READIN

Saturday, May 19th, 2012

🦋 Purple and Orange

Courtesy of Ellen's green thumb:

posted afternoon of May 19th, 2012: 1 response
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🦋 Una Paloma

Speaking as I was the other day of epigraphs, here is a nice one (from one of my birthday books) --

De otros diluvios una paloma escucho

-- Ungaretti, 1925
(epigraph to Antonio Dal Masetto's La culpa, 2010)

posted morning of May 19th, 2012: Respond
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Friday, May 18th, 2012

🦋 Sortes vergilianæ

The beauty of the Virgilian Lottery has little in common with Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky.”

posted morning of May 18th, 2012: Respond
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Monday, April 30th, 2012

🦋 Otra vez publicación

I got word yesterday that Metamorphoses, the journal of literary translation at Smith College, accepted my translation of Slavko Zupcic's story, "Tescucho, Italia" -- nice! This is the first piece that I have had accepted after submitting it to a couple of magazines and being rejected. Glad I kept sending it out. It will appear in the fall 2013 issue of Metamorphoses.

posted evening of April 30th, 2012: 1 response
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Sunday, April first, 2012

🦋 To Troy, Helen

My latest endeavor into translation hits the streets today: To Troy, Helen, by Fernando Iwasaki. This is my second translation to appear in Words Without Borders; their April issue is devoted to fiction about sex. (The sentence they pick as the header for the story, "She had undressed me then as if she were peeling a piece of fruit," is nice. It's one of a couple of Iwasaki's similes that I find I can't precisely grasp but that I still have enough of a muddled understanding of to render well. And it gives a nice sense of the story's verbal feel.)

posted afternoon of April first, 2012: Respond
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Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

🦋 Bárbula Copies, a funeral home

— Death takes us all. — That was all we would say when customers asked us how we had made the decision to go into the funeral home business here next to the medical school, when they asked us how we could have chosen such a name for our business as Bárbula Copies.

posted evening of March 21st, 2012: Respond
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Tuesday, March 20th, 2012

🦋 Shame

“War is hell,” said Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense in the Obama administration: he said it following the killing of 16 civilians, among them children, by a deranged sergeant in the Afghan province of Kandahar. This massacre unleashed on the world a series of images that one cannot look at without being reminded of similar massacres from the Vietnam War — for instance, My Lai.

-- "Shame", by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

On the subject of shameful killings: Founderstein's Michael Austin has exactly the right take on the killing of Treyvon Martin in Florida last month. (via Russell Arben Fox)

posted evening of March 20th, 2012: Respond
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Thursday, March 15th, 2012

🦋 New Saramago! New Pontiero!

How exciting: the current issue of Guernica features the first half of the story "Things", from Saramago's short story collection Objecto Quase (1978) -- the second half will be published in April. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first time any of these stories has been seen in English translation. The full collection will be published by Verso Books at the end of April, under the title The Lives of Things. Really great news -- Saramago's signature style begins to take shape in these stories, and themes that will occupy his writing throughout his career.

It is also great news to see that the translation is by Giovanni Pontiero, the master who translated so many of Saramago's early books before his untimely death in 1996. Clearly the translation has been out there for a long time, at last it will be available to the public.

Speaking of translation -- I had good news today, word from the editors of Words Without Borders that they'll be publishing my translation of Fernando Iwasaki's "A Troya, Helena," my project of last weekend. It will appear in their April issue.

posted evening of March 15th, 2012: 5 responses
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Sunday, March 11th, 2012

🦋 Oh, that's what that means! ...What does that mean?...

Spent this weekend working on a translation of Fernando Iwasaki's A Troya, Helena, and I think I came up with a pretty convincing rendering by this morning's (submitted) draft. A couple of fun bits from researching meanings in this short story:

• "Helena había resistido demasiado, más de lo que se le podía pedir a una chica que se casa a los veinte años con un huevón de oficio pero sin beneficio."
  I spent a while trying to figure out "de oficio pero sin beneficio" -- my first guess was that the narrator was referring to himself as a jerk "with a job but with no money," which would sort of fit the story but not particularly add much to it... Mariana laughed when she saw the phrase and said he is calling himself un "heuvón de oficio", i.e. an asshole by trade, and then bringing in the phrase "sin oficio ni beneficio" to say he was not doing well even in that chosen trade.
• "Parissi se esmeraba en prolongar el último orgasmo de Helena hasta el límite de las gunfias."
  It took me a long time to get anywhere with this last word, and I'm still not quite comfortable with it. It turns out to be a word from Cortázar's invented jargon glíglico, from Hopscotch. I've taken what might be the coward's way out and rendered it as gunphies, which is the word Rabassa uses in his tranlation, out of a desire to keep the Hopscotch reference intact. (And yes, Cortázar is another big hole in my literacy...)

  Daniel González Dueñas says, in his post on glíglico (which is based on the Porteño dialect Lunfardo), that ‘gunfia’ is an apheresis of ‘esgunfiola’ and can be used to mean ‘boredom’ or ‘disgust’; that “hasta el límite de las gunfias” is something like (if I'm reading right) "as far as propriety will allow." Which sounds, well, a little strange in the context in which it occurs here; but the narrator is a very strange dude to be sure. Maybe "for as long as she would let him."

• "Parissi aferró enhiesto la odalisca cintura que se apretaba contra su cuerpo y ordenó con voz ronca y temblorosa: 'A Troya, Helena. Ahora vamos a Troya'."
  My first reaction was, Why would Parissi say something like that, in that situation? It did not seem to make any sense and kept me from really processing the last two or three paragraphs. It took several rereads of this and the following sentences before I got that Parissi was talking about anal sex; and even after I hit on that interpretation, although it made a lot of things about the closing paragraphs make sense which had not, I was reluctant to go with it. Then I found Francisca Noguerol Jiménez' paper "Vitality, Sensuality, Erudition, Ingenuity: the narratives of Fernando Iwasaki" in which she comments that "The expression ‘To Troy, Helen’ is a clear reference to ‘Greek’ love ‘from behind.’"

posted evening of March 11th, 2012: Respond

Sunday, February 19th, 2012

🦋 El espectador

I am embarking on a new project this week. Recently Yascha Mounk of The Utopian contacted me to ask if I'd like to contribute some short translated pieces to their site's blog. Naturally (given that I've been reading and thinking about Vásquez' work so much lately) the first thing to come to mind was Juan Gabriel Vásquez' weekly column for El espectador, which seems almost perfectly suited for this format. I made contact with Anne McLean and received permission to give this a try -- the first column is up, his January 26th column about Salman Rushdie's canceled appearance at the Jaipur literary festival: Bullies and their certainties.

posted morning of February 19th, 2012: Respond

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