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Saturday, January 28th, 2012
http://htmlgiant.com/random/language-is-the-atmospheric-anomaly-our-fingers-and-tongues-make-happen/
por Christopher Higgs
El lenguaje es la excentricidad atmosférica que nuestros dedos y lenguas hacen ocurrir
Date cuenta del cantar de las lÃneas telefónicas suspendidas, la vibración de antenas de los carros dados ciertas rapideces medias espantosas. --un fenómeno similar, eolian, es ‘flutter’, por causa de vórtices abajo de los cables...
Consider the singing of suspended telephone lines or the vibration of a car antenna at certain mid-gruesome speeds. (A similar aeolian phenomenon is “flutter,†caused by vortices on the leeward side of the wire, distinguished from “gallop†by its high-frequency, low-amplitude motion.) To do so would be synonymous with considering the Kármán vortex street: a term in fluid dynamics for a repeating pattern of swirling vortices caused by the unsteady separation of a fluid’s flow over bluff bodies.
posted morning of January 28th, 2012: Respond
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Friday, January 27th, 2012
Es un hecho bien conocido que una traducción no buen sustituÃa el original.Es también todamente falso.
La traducción (en el primero sentido aquà de Bellos) me mueva pero en esa lectura me preguntaba a qué manera me debÃa movar. Deseaba desde la adolescencia me poder pensar traductor y desde casi tan largo me preguntaba ¿por qué? y ¿qué aún significa éso?También no tengo respuestas...
posted evening of January 27th, 2012: Respond
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Wednesday, January 25th, 2012
El último cuento de la colección nueva de Zupcic, Médicos taxistas, se dramáticamente diferencia del resto -- todos los son muy elegantes y lúcidos pero no (a excepción tal vez del hermoso "Tescucho, Italia") me inquietante cogen como los padre-ausente-y-criminal cuentos de sus colecciones jóvenes. Éso sà y hace una conexión bonita a los cuentos anteriores. (Los nuevos son indudablemente más fácil traducir, no estoy seguro de cómo esto interpretar.)
Cada uno de los cuentos en Médicos taxistas es a su manera excéntrico, es difÃcil clasificarlos juntos. El cuento titular me encuenta y en segunda lectura me deja pensando que es otra cosa detrás de la historia pero no puedo ver qué es. "El Barbero de DalÃ" me ha riendo y rascándome la cabeza. "Doble Chávez" me da un sentido no del todo bienvenido de la identificación. Una lectura muy divertida.
"Amor que a otro puerto pertenece," el último cuento y el más largo, reexamina a otra manera la tema de Zlatica Didic y su hijo Zlatko Didic que Zupcic (Slavko el hijo de Slavko Zupcic) visitó por primera vez en su "Cartas hacia una novela". Zlatko comienca aquÃ, "Comencé a escribir este relato hace casi veinte años..." y de repente tengo una imagen más claro y más estimulante del (sin duda pequeño) cuerpo de su obra. Todo se junta.
 The last story in Zupcic's new collection Médicos taxistas differs dramatically from the rest -- all of them are elegant and clear but none of them (except perhaps the beautiful "Tescucho, Italy") seizes me in the disquieting way that the absent/criminal-father stories in his juvenile collections do. This one does, and it creates a nice link to his earlier stories. (The new ones are indubitably easier to translate, I'm not quite sure what to make of this.)
Each of the stories in Médicos taxistas is oddball in its own way, I would have a hard time grouping them together. The title story enchants me and on second reading makes me feel I'm missing some element behind the story -- but certain that the unknown element is present behind the story. "The Barber of DalÃ" ("DalÃ's Barber" is probably a closer translation but I like the rhythm of this title) leaves me laughing and scratching my head. "Chávez Double" gives me a not completely welcome rush of identification. All in all a lot of fun to read.
"A Love Which Belongs to the Other Door," the last story and the longest, takes another look, through a different glass, at the subject of Zlatica Didic and his son Zlatko Didic, whom Zupcic (Slavko son of Slavko) first visited in his story "Letters Towards a Novel". Zlatko starts off by saying, "I began writing this story almost twenty years ago..." and suddenly I get a much clearer, more moving vision of the (to be sure small) body of his work -- it all comes together.
↻...done
posted evening of January 25th, 2012: Respond
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Sunday, January 15th, 2012
I rode my bike down Muntaner to Diagonal. Parked it in front of the Dau al set gallery and rang Valerie's doorbell.
—When you come to the door, so you won't have to tell me who it is, ring three times in a row: ta, ta, ta. That way I'll know it's you. —that's what she had told me, the first day.
The door opened and I went upstairs. Valerie went over to the sofa with me as soon as I came in, she was moving her hands slowly in front of me, telling me her mother had been in the hospital since that afternoon, she feared the worst, that she had only come away from there to meet me, so that I would not come to an empty apartment and be scared.
She gave me a kiss on the cheek, paid me, and we left the apartment. Of course I didn't tell her any of what I'd been thinking about. I wasn't going to be seeing her anymore, surely; but I had left the mobile -- the lizards, the Gaudi mobile, on her sofa.
 I have made a couple of revisions and have submitted the story to Words Without Borders. The biographical note I submitted:
Jeremy Osner is a computer programmer living in New Jersey. He came to Spanish translation late in life and has been learning the language as he learns the voices of the authors he has translated. Notable among these is Venezuelan Slavko Zupcic, a psychiatrist now living in Valencia, Spain, whose stories examine the gaps in understanding at the borders between people.
This story is from Mr. Zupcic's recently published collection, Médicos Taxistas.
posted evening of January 15th, 2012: Respond
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 I have been struggling for a couple of weeks with translating a trilogy of stories by Zupcic about his character Vinko Spolovtiva... took a break from that to work on "Tescucho, Italia" from his new book Médicos taxistas and I was able in just a few days to get a working version together that I think reads quite well. You can listen to me reading it if you like; and hopefully soon you will be able to read it published somewhere!
posted afternoon of January 15th, 2012: 1 response
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Tuesday, January 10th, 2012
 I was translating (just starting to translate, I was on the first page) into English a translation into Croatian of Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage. It seemed like it was going to be a magnum opus...
posted morning of January 10th, 2012: Respond
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Saturday, December 24th, 2011
I am setting a goal for myself of finishing my translation of Zupcic's "Vinko Spolovtiva, ¿Quién te mató?" Probably not much blogging this week.
 (Oh and happy year's end!)
posted evening of December 24th, 2011: Respond
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Thursday, December 15th, 2011
by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
El espectador
December 8, 2011
Although I’ve been doing it non-stop for thirty years, in spite of living my life surrounded by other people who are always doing it, I still think there are few activities so intriguing as the reading of novels.
I keep wondering why we do it: why would an adult devote his time, his mental energies, his moral intelligence to reading about things that never happened to people who never existed; how could this activity be so important, so vital, that this person would voluntarily withdraw from real life to carry it out. I've come across a few answers over the years, some of them in conversations with other addicted readers, but mostly in books here and there along the way. And indeed, the most recent of these books is truly marvelous: The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist consists of six essays in which Orhan Pamuk seeks to answer one crucial question: What happens to us when we read (and write) novels? This book is the most illuminating, most stimulating, most abundant examination of this difficult topic that I've read in years. I can do no less than to offer this urgent call to readers.
"I have learned by experience that there are many ways to read a novel," says Pamuk. "We read sometimes logically, sometimes with our eyes, sometimes with our imagination, sometimes with a small part of our mind, sometimes the way we want to, sometimes the way the book wants us to, and sometimes with every fiber of our being." In other words: there are no two identical readers of the same novel; not even two identical readings. And this fact, which seems so obvious, is what can explain the effects, the intimate, unpredictable effects the novel can have on us. What are these effects? Pamuk says we read the way we drive a car, pressing the pedals and shifting gears while watching the signals and traffic and the landscape around us: our intellect moves in a thousand and one directions in every instant. With part of our mind we do the simplest thing: follow the story. But readers of "serious" novels are doing something more: are looking constantly for the secret center of the novel, for that revelation the novel seeks to bring to light, which cannot be summarized, which can only be expressed just as the novel expresses it. Sábato was once asked what he meant to say in On Heroes and Tombs. Sábato replied, "If I could have said it any other way, I would never have written the book."
To read a novel is to leave behind a Cartesian understanding of the world. We know these things never happened, but we believe in them as if they had happened; we know they are the product of someone else's imagination, but we live through them as if they were a part of our own experience. "Our ability to believe simultaneously in contradictory states," according to Pamuk, is an essential characteristic of the reader of novels; another one is the urge to understand, not to judge, the characters. "At the heart of the novelist's craft lies an optimism," says Pamuk, "which thinks that the knowledge we gather from our everyday experience, if given proper form, can become valuable knowledge about reality." As readers, we share in this belief: that a good novel is a means of bringing a little bit of order to the chaos which reigns around us, of beginning to understand it. And that’s no small thing.
Vásquez (who I think is my favorite new author that I found out about this year) writes a weekly column for Bogotá-based newspaper El espectador. Many thanks to Mr. Vásquez for allowing me to post this translation here, and especially to Anne McLean for helping me to contact him and for passing an editorial eye over my effort. It reads much more smoothly with her suggestions incorporated.
posted evening of December 15th, 2011: 1 response
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Saturday, December third, 2011
 In this autumn of 2011, the peak concert experiences are coming fast and furious. Last night John and I went out to Union Hall in Brooklyn, the basement of which contains about the nicest performance space of its size that I can remember being in, to see Jeffrey Foucault and Mark Erelli touring their new album, Seven Curses. We showed up about a half hour early and got a chance to mingle with the other concert-goers, a lovely crowd of folkies, chat about the music, the weather, the neighborhood... talked up Mountain Station to a couple of people who seemed receptive...
Jeff came on stage looking like Ulysses S. Grant with a Gibson J-45 and Mark picked up his mandolin; sat down about ten feet away from us. After a little loose strumming and tuning up they broke into a clear, insistent rhythm, chords ringing out, sweeping us away. The two sets were a mix of covers and originals from both artists, tracks from the new record and from their back catalogs, murder ballads and love songs -- one particularly charming moment in the second set came when a man from the audience called out a request for Dylan's "Shooting Star" -- Erelli knew it, Foucault said he could figure it out, and (after a brief debate over whether they should play Bad Company's "Shooting Star" instead) the two of them improvised a rocking cover version on the spot.
posted morning of December third, 2011: Respond
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Monday, November 28th, 2011
Brandon Holmquest's analysis of the practice of translating poetry is well worth reading. Holmquest translates Borges' poem "El general Quiroga va en coche al muere" and examines closely the decisions he is making at each juncture.
posted morning of November 28th, 2011: Respond
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