Two Voices Salon: Sean Cotter on Romanian Author Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding
Center for the Art of Translation | 582 Market Street, Suite 700 | San Francisco, CA
We welcome Romanian translator Sean Cotter to talk about his translation of this work by one of Romania’s most celebrated authors. The book was one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a bestseller from the day of its release. Cotter’s English translation of Blinding was released in 2013 by Archipelago Books and soon went on to become one of that year’s most talked-about novels-in-translation. The book includes some of the most complex, ornate, and obscure words, sentences, and paragraphs that you will read in a work of fiction. In this Salon, we’ll talk to Cotter about the amazing work he did in bringing this book to an English-language audience.
Audio Table of Contents
[Pre-Interview]
0:20 The Council of Egypt by Leonardo Sciascia (translated by Adrienne Foulke)
1:40 Texas by Carmen Boullosa (translated by Samantha Schnee)
3:00 Report from the Besieged City by Zbigniew Herbert (translated by John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter)
3:45 Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano (translated by Mark Polizzotti)
4:40 Music & Literature Issue 5
5:40 Clarice Lispector, especially Água Viva (translated by Stefan Tobler)
6:10 Seiobo There Below by Laszlo Krasznahorkai (translated by Ottilie Mulzet) and Three Light Years by Andrea Canobbio (translated by Anne Milano Appel)
[Interview]
7:10 Introductions
8:50 How the project to translate Blinding came about
10:15 Cărtărescu’s place on the Romanian writing scene and influences
13:30 Cotter’s interactions with Cărtărescu while translating Blinding, and how he dealt with problem words
17:50: Cărtărescu vis a vis Communism and the fall of the regime in 1989
20:55 What Blinding is about
26:10 Concepts of normality and abnormality in Blinding
27:54 What Cotter likes and didn’t like about Blinding
33:35 Why is the book titled Blinding, and was Cotter tempted to leave the title in the Romanian, as Orbitor?
36:20 The meeting of Cărtărescu’s various translators from around the world
41:35 Would Cotter translate Volume 2 of Blinding, and Cotter’s process while translating Volume 1.
46:05 The sounds of the Romanian original
46:55 Cărtărescu’s Romanian publisher, Humanitas
51:10 Cărtărescu’s publishers during the Communist era
52:45 How Cotter came to Romania
54:40 Translation problems Cotter dealt with while translating Blinding
1:05:10 Biblical language in Blinding and how Cotter dealt with it
1:09:00 Making Cărtărescu’s racial language appropriate for an American setting
Sean Cotter is a professor of literature and literary translation at the University of Texas at Dallas and has translated many books of Romanian literature, most recently Mircea Cătărescu’s Solenoid (Deep Vellum, 2022).