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Featured Audio and Articles
TWO VOICES: Jay Rubin and J. Philip Gabriel on Translating MurakamiScott Esposito, April 5, 2012 12:41:00 PM
On April 3, 2012, translators Jay Rubin and J. Philip Gabriel—best-known as the main English translators of Haruki Murakmai's novels and short stories—discussed their work with the Japanese master of the surreal's latest book, 1Q84. The event got off to a proper start with a discussion of one of the primary questions surrounding 1Q84: how do you pronounce its title? Jay Rubin canvassed the audience for answers, which ranged from "nineteen-eighty-four" to "eye-que-eight-four" (which Rubin ruled out, since the first character is a number one). He then went on to a discussion of the role that the title plays in the novel . . .
THAT OTHER WORD: Episode 1 | March 2012 | Lorin SteinMadeleine LaRue, March 20, 2012 03:11:00 AM
In this first episode, Scott Esposito interviews Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review and former senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. They discuss editing the English version of Jean-Christophe Valtat’s 03 (translated by Mitzi Angel), procuring the rights to Roberto Bolaño’s works and editing Natasha Wimmer’s translations, and Stein's translation of Edouard Levé's book Autoportrait. Daniel Medin and Scott Esposito also chat about César Aira’s Varamo, László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, and Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories.
TWO VOICES: Stephen Snyder on Yoko Ogawa, Haruki Murakami, and the Business of International LiteratureScott Esposito, May 12, 2011 11:39:00 AM
Early in this Two Voices event, translator Stephen Snyder made a bold pronouncement: Haruki Murakami would win a Nobel prize, and 1Q84, his blockbuster novel that many are comparing to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, would be the book to do it. Snyder wasn't wholly going out on a limb. As he told the audience, he correctly predicted Kenzaburo Oe's Nobel prize in 1994. But more to the point of his presentation, Snyder has seen the intricacies of the publishing industry close up, and he has a strong sense of how tastes are made with regard to inernational authors.
Upcoming Events
Lit&Lunch: How to Translate Fairy Tales, with Kate Bernheimer, Ilya Kaminsky, and Maria Tatar
June 12, 2012
Contributors and the editor of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, an anthology of fairy tales, discuss the unique craft of translating myth and the history of fairy tales.
A Night of Fairy Tales
June 12, 2012
To close out the 2011-12 Two Voices season, join the staff and friends of the Center for the Art of Translation for a special evening on translating fairy tales!
Audio Entries
Co-translation from Korean to French
Posted on November 30, 2010 by Scott EspositoI'm always a fan of different and innovative ways that translators do what they do. The Korean Herald has an interesting article on the method of Korean-French co-translators Choe Ae-young and Jean Bellemin-Nol:
Together, the two have developed an original, effective process of co-translating. First, Choe translates the entire Korean text to French, with a long list of footnotes that contain explanations of cultural context, synonyms of major words, and alternative ways of interpreting the text. Bellemin-Nol then revises the first draft and rewrites the text into more refined French, taking Choe’s footnotes into consideration. Then the “talk” begins. “From this stage we wouldn’t use my first translated draft at all,” Choe said. “We’d discuss extensively comparing the original Korean text and the second translated version which has been revised by Dr. Bellemin-Nol, for the final copy that would compromise the two drafts.”
Bellemin-Nol said though the two discuss their work in a “cheerful mood” 90 percent of the time, the mood can get very tense for the remaining 10 percent. “I try to keep the original context of the Korean text as much as possible while Dr. Bellemin-Nol brings the perspective of French readers,” Choe explained. “This process requires a lot of compromising and tough decisions.”
The whole article is rather in-depth and well worth a look.
And the book that is being translated sounds quite intriguing . . .
On Friday, Choe and Bellemin-Nol jointly received the 18th Daesan Literary Award for their latest collaborative Korean-French translation work, “Interdit de Folie (Wanting to Go Insane, Yet Unable),” a full-length novel by Korean author Yi In-seong. An extremely experimental literary work, the original text tells the story of a severely traumatized Korean man in the 1980s who suffers from painful personal memories to a degree that he’d rather lose his sanity.