In this episode of Hawthornden's Como Conversazione, we discuss the problem of English. What happens when you bring a nation’s literature into its colonizer’s language? Is it inevitably a kind of violence? Here, we look to the field of translation studies, which provides some answers—not all of them satisfying.
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Shame
In this episode of Hawthornden’s Como Conversazione, the translators discuss the fraught emotional condition of their work: the sense that not only is their work shameful and grotesque but that they are too, for daring to attempt it.
Translation demands a deep and scholarly knowledge of language, which never feels sufficient. Translators are often faced with a binary of either making themselves invisible or asserting their styles. Many of them are caught between identities. You’ll hear Maureen Freely, an American who grew up in Istanbul, talk about her vexed relationship with Orhan Pamuk and Tiffany Tsao, American-born, but of Indonesian heritage, confess the shame she felt when translating Budi Darma. All of the translators in this group, for reasons of temperament and structure, seem to have a masochistic relationship to their work. But as in all cases of masochism, the pain is a kind of pleasure, too.
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First Sentences
In this second episode of Hawthornden’s Como Conversazione, we explore beginnings. Anyone who has been around kids knows that a good Lego build starts with a good base. In a translation, this is the first sentence of a text. First sentences are so often the most famous lines. They are a place for a translator to make their mark. They dictate the voice in which the book unfolds. But has the importance of the first sentence been overly inflated?
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Practical Translation: Proust
In the first episode of Hawthornden’s Como Conversazione, we start with an exercise in practical translation: a discussion of seven different English interpretations of one, highly complicated sentence from Volume One of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Maureen Freely will speak first, followed by Daisy Rockwell, Virginia Jewiss, Jeremy Tiang, and finally Tiffany Tsao. It sounds like a lot to keep track of, but in the course of these conversations, you will get to know all of their voices very well.
Welcome to Season Three of The Critic and Her Publics: On Translation.
In 1999, twelve distinguished writers gathered at Casa Ecco, a villa on Lake Como, to discuss the art of translation. Twenty-five years later, their ideas are still apt and powerful. Last October, Merve Emre convened a group of translators and publishers at the same villa to return to those ideas and to examine a field at an inflection point.
In this series, you’ll hear from the translators Maureen Freely, Daisy Rockwell, Virginia Jewiss, Jeremy Tiang, and Tiffany Tsao, as well as publishers Adam Levy (Transit Books) and Jacques Testard (Fitzcarraldo Editions).
Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by Leanne Shapton
This Como Conversazione season of The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Hawthornden Foundation, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub.
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