In which I let Rabassa and Barnstone duke it out about memory, error, and the ethics of translation

In his book If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, Gregory Rabassa asserts lots of interesting and valuable stuff, then this clinker on pp. 61-62: The completion of work is best done in translation, where the translator can work at things denied the author in his own language, even the way Saint Jerome mistakenly [...]

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Rabassa: evergreen words

One of the real struggles in translation is to match diction. Is the original text light, snide, slang-filled, formal, technical, intentionally heightened, obsessively literary? If so, the translator needs to match that tone in the second language, to carry the flavor of the text. But you also don’t want to create something that is so [...]

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translating as writing

From Gregory Rabassa If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, 2005, New Directions Books The translator, we should know, is a writer too. As a matter of fact, she could be called the ideal writer because all she has to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all the other essentials have already been [...]

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that bugbear of timid technicians: the value judgment

Welcome to the next of many future posts about the issues and theory of translating. I have quite the intimidating list of hard-core theory books to read, and I need to be making sense of them even as I try to make sense of Shez’s Hebrew and create poems in English that are honest, riveting [...]

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