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In late February I finished up the translation of a novel. In mid-March my son was born. Caring for a baby is not all too different than dealing with a challenging translation, though granted the hours are less convenient and the boss often poses unreasonable demands. In both cases there is proper procedure—first draft, dictionary…
I like to follow up my reading of a text with its cinematic counterpart. After finishing Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, I rented the DVD of the same name with great anticipation. But after the credits rolled, I was unsatisfied: while the cinematic version of Woolf’s novel provides a touching and well-acted rendering of her vision,…
As children, we’re both fascinated with the idea of the great big world around us, and consumed with the notion that we are at its center. I recall sleepless nights, hearing my father return home late from work, and tiptoeing past my sleeping sister’s bed to the living room so that I could sit with…
When my mother, born in America to Israeli parents, first met my father in Tel Aviv, she said she knew he was right for her because he was an American living in Israel. As a young woman who grew up in transit—constantly being moved around between the two countries—she recognized in him a kindred spirit:…
My China-born daughter is thirteen the summer day we take a cruise down the Lijiang River from Guilin to Yangshao. This stretch is said to be the inspiration for much Chinese poetry and art: “Guilin’s unique topography. and beautiful scenery of the Karst Mountains and the unsurpassed beauty of the Li River has attracted public figures…
Recently, I was reading The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov’s antic retelling of the stories of Faust and Pontius Pilot. The novel follows—in part—the devil and his deranged retinue, including a bipedal cat and a naked woman, as they wreak havoc on Moscow. The edition I own, translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor,…
Stratis Haviaras, translation of The Canon, poems by C. P. Cavafy: Haviaras’s marvelous new translations of the one hundred fifty-four poems Cavafy published during his lifetime resonate, as Seamus Heaney says in his introduction, with “the abundance and excitement of . . . restoration.” (Hermes)
I am translating the world into mockingbird, into blue jay, into cat-bombing avian obbligato, because I want more noise, more bells, more senseless tintinnabulation, more crow, thunder, squawk, more bird song, more Beethoven, more philharmonic mash notes to the gods. I am translating the world into onyx, into Abyssinian, into pale-blue Visigoth…
Marilyn Hacker, translation of Here There Was Once a Country, poems by Vénus Khoury-Ghata: A searing translation of the poems of a prolific Lebanese writer who has always straddled two cultures, the Arabic and the French. Hacker luminously brings to life Khoury-Ghata’s intimate, mysterious, and unique voice. (Oberlin)
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