Showing posts with label Translation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Translation. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 03, 2018

Emily Wilson and translating The Odyssey

I have yet to read Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, but I fully intend to soon. In the meantime I have been keeping up with her Twitter account @EmilyRCWilson, where she selects passages from the poem and compares various translations and explains why she chose the words/phrases she did for these selections. It's a great look behind the curtain as she
comments on how translators such as George Chapman (1615), Alexander Pope (1725), T.E. Lawrence (1932), Robert Fitzgerald (1961), Richmond Lattimore (1965), Robert Fagles (1996), Stanley Lombardo (2000), and Stephen Mitchell (2013) have interpreted different words, phrases, and concepts from the original Greek into English.

The quote is from the page at her site that gathers the various tweets on each passage and her comments. If you have any interest in The Odyssey, these threads are essential reading. As Dan Chiasson put it in his article at The New Yorker, Wilson is "The Classics Scholar Redefining What Twitter Can Do."

There are many articles mentioned at Wilson's home page, but I want to link to a few I found helpful.

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

An Interview with Translator Tim Wilkinson

The Asymptote Blog has an interview with translator Tim Wilkinson. I've read his translations of Imre Kertész's Facelessness and Fiasco, Miklós Szentkuthy's Marginalia on Casanova and Towards the One and Only Metaphor (along with excerpts from other of his books, and I have Prae on deck), and Death of an Athlete by Miklós Mészöly. I have him to thank for many extraordinary books I wouldn't have had access to without his translations.

From the end of the interview, with a couple of my notes:
Q: Which of the translations that you’ve worked on was the most challenging? Why?

A: I suppose the Szentkuthy ones, not least because he was writing on a formidable range of subjects, from what most people think of as fairly abstruse mathematical theory, physics, botany, music, literary theory, painting, and so on.
[It was overwhelming to read. I can't imagine what it was like to translate.]

Q: Which one author do you think most deserves wider recognition worldwide?

A: I could easily add a couple of dozen other living Hungarian authors, but let me content myself with just mentioning György Spiró.
[Yes! I've made the wish that more of his work available in translation.]

Be sure and check it out.