It’s almost time for the A-Fest Translation Colloquium! Mentors Esther Allen, Mara Faye Lethem, Sandra Kingery, and myself have been working for weeks with some tremendously talented emerging translators on their renditions of new writing from Latin America. Full profiles of this incredible group can be found here. The Translation Colloquium is free and open to … More A-FEST Translation Colloquium
Well, all literary translators working from Spanish to English who can be in NYC on March 31, 2017. I’m thrilled to have been invited by conference organizer Mónica Ríos to develop a translation colloquium within AFest, an extraordinary international gathering of women who write in Spanish across Americas, which will explore the connection between gender and literature as a … More Calling all translators!
As one of the judges for the Best Translated Book Award this year, I’ve been sharing my thoughts on a few of the books under consideration for the prize with the readers of the fabulous website Three Percent. Here’s a sample: On Yoel Hoffmann’s Moods, translated by Peter Cole for New Directions “The specter of stories untold is especially … More Dispatches from the BTBA
I may have been a bit lax on the blog lately, but I’ve been writing quite a bit (chau, dissertation). I’m pretty excited about my most recent book review: not only was it for Music & Literature—one of my favorite mags—but I also got to talk about the latest translation of a book by Mario Bellatin, a … More All about Bellatin
I can’t seem to stop thinking about the disappointing turn Zadie Smith’s otherwise beautiful reflection on climate change for the New York Review of Books takes at the end. Early in the piece, Smith talks about how comfortably her contemporaries have settled into discussions of the “new normal”—avoiding, like the bereaved, allusions to what once was. She takes up arms against … More Blame Derrida
A few months ago, I found myself de sobremesa with a motley bunch of porteños and transplants from all corners, staring at the cheese rinds, empty bottles, and cracker shards scattered across the table as reminders of the pleasant meal we’d just shared and the less pleasant morning to come. In one of the sated … More on causes, lost and found.
Tierra de los padres dir. Nicolás Prividera (Argentina 2011) Of all the things one could say about it, it would be hard to accuse Tierra de los padres of a lack of ambition, aesthetically or politically. The film, which was controversially excluded from the BAFICI and Mar del Plata festivals despite being lauded in Toronto, … More the angels of history
Many thanks to Scott Esposito of The Quarterly Conversation, who brought Daniel Bosch’s recent essay on William Kentridge to my attention. Those of you who read Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds will remember Kentridge’s appearance toward the end of the book, and how his explicitly rendered lines of sight echo the narrator’s particular way of … More a bouquet of dark matter
If there’s one thing translators and theorists of translation love to discuss, debate, and ultimately disagree about, it’s the extent to which a translated work should sound “natural” in the target language. It’s been a hot topic since at least 1813, when Friederich Schleiermacher presented his two opposing methods of translating—the first being to move … More in other words
…turns out to be Lennie Tristano + a photograph of Adorno in a bathing suit. Image via The Poetry Foundation.
Heather Cleary 