A few thoughts on dictionaries

A few thoughts on dictionaries Elliott batTzedek      Translating, and reading about translation, has made me hyper-aware of dictionaries. There are, in turns out, many different kinds, each with its own purpose and usefulness.      The “dictionary” most of us know is a book that is a collection of words with information about those words. It is [...]

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God as Translator

two quotations from Willis Barnstone The Poetics of Translation, pp 130-131 God created through the word. And what did God do with that word? With its utterance God translated divine sound into matter and being, thereby bringing the cosmos, the earth, and the earth’s inhabitants, great and small, into temporal existence. Since clock time did [...]

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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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Thank you, Mr. Barnstone

When, among a group of translation students, I got to have a long and winding conversation with Willis Barnstone, he said many many smart (as in genius-level) things about translating. One of those has become not only my favorite, but my guiding mantra for poetry: When it seems impossible, try a little harder and it [...]

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Psapfo, Latinization, and voiceless bilabial fricative f

from Willis Barnstone’s translation of Sappho’s poems, a footnote on the intricacies of the pronunciation of her name. I leave the hardest part of this essay to a footnote, still pondering on phi and eta, whether Greek phi = English ph or f, and whether Greek eta = e or i, and a few other [...]

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