Jaan Kaplinski was born to an Estonian mother and Polish father in 1941 in Tartu, Estonia. His father was arrested by the NKVD for ‘possible subversive anti-Soviet activity’ and disappeared in the Gulag archipelago during the war, probably dying in 1943. Says Kaplinski: “He saw me, but I have no memory of having seen him.”
Language: French
Ladies and gents, let us introduce Asymptote Blog’s newest regular feature: a Proust (or should we say Lydia Davis?) questionnaire for translators! First up, French translator extraordinaire Edward Gauvin, whose newest translation, The Conductor and Other Tales by Jean Ferry– French Pataphysician, Surrealist, fantasist, and “borderline” Oulipian–is just out from Wakefield Press.
Who is your favorite fictional character of all time?
Borges.
When Beckett translated his own En Attendant Godot into Waiting for Godot it was an act of editing as much as anything else. Some of his changes were quite normal for a translator (the selection of the best words, the retention of the play’s themes and shape and humor) and some unique to the self-translator: reworking passages, adding phrases (a whole back-and-forth of cursing, for instance), cutting speeches. The French is riddled with rien; the English with ‘nothing.’ In one of his many amusing alterations he turns phoque (the French word for seal, which sounds like the English cuss ‘fuck’) into ‘grampus,’ which is an obscure English word for dolphin that sounds, if pronounced like a Frenchman, like a small turd. READ MORE…
When you think of the Dutch contributions to pop music, you might find yourself drawing a blank, albeit perhaps one decorated with some tulips, marijuana leaves, and gay marriage. There’s no reason to, really, you only have to listen to the Van Halen boys (who share my hometown, as I recently found out), the fantastic “Radar Love” by Golden Earring, or Morrissey favorites Shocking Blue, a 1960s combo whose songs were made famous by bands as diverse as Bananarama (“Venus”) and Nirvana (“Love Buzz”). READ MORE…
In the movie version of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the gorgeous, tortured teenagers who’ve been guiding the film’s young protagonist – another gorgeous, tortured teenager – in matters of love, identity, and music, decide to take the boy on a special trip through a Pittsburgh tunnel. A song comes on the radio, and the girl climbs out through the back window to emerge standing on the back of the flatbed truck in Leo’s “king of the world” pose at the end of the tunnel. Whereas the book can leave the actual song unnamed and universal, the film has to be specific and actually play the song. In a rare false note for the otherwise entirely truthy film, finding the mysterious song that prompted this liberating escapade becomes a matter of serious concern for our serious young protagonist, even though everybody born before 1990 will have immediately guessed it: David Bowie’s deathlessly cool “Heroes”. READ MORE…
Paris / worldwide. One exciting piece of news this week is the publication of a new installment of a diminutive Gaulish adventurer’s globe-trotting escapades. Published last Thursday in France, Astérix chez les Pictes also appeared on the very same day in twenty-five languages, which in itself is cause for celebration. Along with the usual suspects (English, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch) it’s good to see a fair slew of minority languages too. Readers on the Iberian peninsula have been particularly lucky, with no fewer than six editions catering to the various language communities there—Portuguese and Castilian, of course, but also Asturian, Basque, Catalan, and Galician. READ MORE…
Pop songs by their very nature worm their way into your head Suzanne Vega-style, their hooks made to be memorable, their melodies fine-tuned for instant recall. No wonder then that they travel so well; Miley’s latest hitting just as hard in Madrid as in Atlanta or Cardiff. What’s more, a great pop song doesn’t just transfer well in its original incarnation, American or British pop songs are easily translated, re-arranged, and sold in other countries (sometimes even by the artists themselves; the Beatles in German! Stevie Wonder in Italian!).
Even more astonishingly (especially from a literary standpoint) songs in Hebrew or Korean have sometimes been hits outside of Israel or South Korea without undergoing any changes or translations. And that’s not even mentioning the songs originally written in Hungarian or Portuguese that conquered the world in English translation. This biweekly series will be your guide in this pan-global pop conspiracy, reintroducing you to songs you thought you knew and opening your ears to the wonderfully deep reserves of fantastic covers places like Thailand, Germany, or Ethiopia have to offer.
“When I was young I brushed my teeth with a straight piece of bone, the bristles were thick and hard like a wheat field, until my mother would rub her finger over them and complain ‘Damien, that’s disgusting, you know you’re supposed to say when your brush is worn out!’ and throw the thing in the drawer of the painted sideboard. Later, in the years when I was still wearing long, striped bathing suits, we had slightly curved implements, the handles I mean. The bristles were in clusters separated by a little gap, like a flowerbed, and on the back there were little holes in the furrows and thin colored lines, like on the bathing suits… They lost their bristles very fast, and then my mother blamed me for getting rid of them too often. I don’t know why we didn’t throw away toothbrushes at our house. There was a drawer full of them, out of commission—a toothbrush graveyard. The sideboard Aunt Cécile had painted was a Campo Santo of objects: we put everything broken, or no longer used, in there… Then came the era of metal brushes. It was after I came back from the regiment. They were pitiful things. The others, the bone ones, turned yellow, but it didn’t help to call the steel in the new ones stainless, it aged very badly.” READ MORE…