Monthly Archives: April 2014

Gatsby in Translationland: A Polish “Gatsby” in the 21st Century

April 10, 2014  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Jacek Dehnel and Julia Sherwood

"We have to bear in mind that Demkowska was working under very different circumstances: behind the Iron Curtain and without access to Google."

Asymptote Blog is celebrating The Great Gatsby’s 89th anniversary with two essays dedicated to Gatsby, translated: what does a seminal work of 20th-century Americana look like outside the tight nexus of American lit? This essay, first in a two-part series, focuses on rewriting Gatsby in 21st-century Poland. 

*****

Exactly half a century divides the first (and, until recently, the only) Polish translation of The Great Gatsby by Ariadna Demkowska that saw several editions from my new version (a second translation, by Jędrzej Polak, was issued only once). Until now Poles unable to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work in the original had only Demkowska’s translation to rely on. I myself read the book as a teenager when it first appeared in Czytelnik’s Nike series.  READ MORE…

Interview with Alex Cigale: Part I

April 9, 2014  |  in Interviews  |  by Eva Richter

"As is true for many of my current projects, for the first fifteen years of reading him, my feeling was: Untranslatable."

Asymptote editor-at-large and accomplished poet and translator Alex Cigale is hard at work on a forthcoming book of translations of neo-futurist Serge Segay’s poetry titled exoDICKERING: Compositions 1963-1985, and recently set up a Kickstarter campaign to help him finish his work. In part one of a conversation with Asymptote Blog, Cigale talks about the roots of Russian Futurism and its modern inheritors, politics at play in Russian poetry, and the unique challenge of translating a linguistic system that associates every letter of the alphabet with a feeling-sense (and a color!).

READ MORE…

Imagined Bridges: On Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge Over the Drina

April 8, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by Sarah Robinson

What does medieval Bosnia have to do with a destroyed-and-rebuilt Italian bridge? An architect responds.

The word bridge comes from the words log and beam; the earliest bridges were trees that fell over and connected two opposing banks. The wood beams that make this bridge, the Ponte Coperto in Pavia, Italy, are exalted in the vault, their circumference larger than any neighboring tree. The columns that support this vast lid were exhumed from a mountain of granite, their chisel marks and eased edges the distilled labors of a multitude of hands. Up close, they are heavy, rutted, imperfect—but from a distance the columns stand delicately, twenty-four strong on each side of a thickened waist. The roofed colonnade is held by four arches that touch the river in three places below. The sense of solidity underfoot is echoed overhead, shelter and possibility both made new in the connection.

READ MORE…

The Joys and Dangers of Translating Asian Dictionaries: Part III.

April 7, 2014  |  in Essays, Translations  |  by Eric Gurevitch

"If the king organizes the Mānasollāsa, he is also organized by it."

Click back to see Part I and Part II of this series. Or you can enjoy this post all on its own!

*****

The translation of the language of things into that of man is not only a translation of the mute into the sonic; it is also the translation of the nameless into name. It is therefore the translation of an imperfect language into a more perfect one, and cannot but add something to it, namely knowledge.

—   Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”

In my previous posts I discussed the dangers of reading Asian encyclopedias by discussing two fictional representations of Asian systems of knowledge. Today, I return to reality by looking at a very real, very dear-to-me Indian encyclopedia, the Mānasollāsa of the 12th century South Indian king Someśvara III. It is the first general accounting of the various forms of scientific knowledge we find in pre-modern India. Topping 8000 verses, it is monumental, true to Aude Doody’s definition: “a grand-scale reference work with retrieval devices.” Because of its massive scope, it has not yet been fully translated into English or any other language (though sections have been translated into Kannada).

READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 4th April 2014: Wiki-Dictionaries, Muhammed: the Opera, Translating Kafka and Joyce

April 4, 2014  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from across the world

Happy April! It’s too late for April Fool’s trickery at the roundup, but the announcement of German publisher PediaPress’ proposal to print out all of Wikipedia—yes, all four million articles, amounting to one thousand volumes and a bookcase eight feet long and 32 feet high—certainly seems like a prank of Rushdie-selfie proportions. READ MORE…

But will translators scare the children?

April 3, 2014  |  in Essays  |  by M. Lynx Qualey

"My sons can handle knowing their Calvino was translated."

My first literary entanglement—or the first one I remember—was with folktales. While Danish and German tales were undoubtedly my introduction to the form, by the time memory kicks in, I am scouring local libraries and filling Christmas wish lists with requests for Greek myths, Norwegian sagas, Chinese tales, Italian fairy stories (yes, the Calvino), and any others that an intrepid relative might find.

READ MORE…

My l’esprit de l’escalier and Croatian literature abroad

April 2, 2014  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Anda Bukvić

"Should I be firm and show attitude, or rather go with the soft, constructive approach? I chose the second, and I made a grave mistake."

January and February marked a celebration of the third anniversary of a valuable international volunteer project: a journal dedicated to literary translation going under the unexpectedly mathematical name of Asymptote. Literary evenings and panels were organized in London, New York, Boston and Zagreb on this occasion (the birthday party lasts throughout April as well, venturing to Philadelphia, Shanghai, Berlin, Buenos Aires and Sydney). READ MORE…