ReadySteadyBlog
TEV: "One of the UK's best and brightest book bloggers"
All blog entries tagged with 'language'
Thursday 04 March 2010
The Mistake on Page 1,032: On Translating 'Infinite Jest' into German
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” Ulrich Blumenbach quotes Wittgenstein as saying in a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article to describe the challenges and inducements of the six years he spent translating David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (Unendlicher Spass) into German — something he did without input from the author, who refused to speak to him.
Last summer, Blumenbach finally reaped the benefits of his efforts when the novel was released in Germany to great critical and commercial success, and he was awarded the Hieronymusring for Exceptional Achievement in Literary Translation, as well as the Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt Prize for his work (more...)
From Publishing Perspectives.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, language
PermalinkComments (1)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Friday 23 October 2009
New translation of 'The Tin Drum'
Just out is a new translation, by Breon Mitchell, of Günter Grass's The Tin Drum -- to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Via the literary saloon, my attention is brought to Scott Esposito'a Q & A with Breon about the re-translation (over at Two Words).
The most powerful works of literature compel us to reread them—and often more than once. The effect they produce is a combination of linguistic artistry and richness of meaning. The Tin Drum treats universal themes (the father-son conflict, youth and art, sexual awakening, guilt and atonement) against the background of one of the most terrible moments of European history. The result is a stunning work of art—shocking and provocative, complex and innovative, richly rewarding more...
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, language
PermalinkComments (0)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Monday 28 September 2009
Books of the week w/c 28.09.09
This week's two highlighted RSB Books of the Week are The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl by J.N. Mohanty (Yale University Press)
described in the publisher blurb as a "deeply insightful book [that]
traces the development of Husserl's thought from his earliest
investigations in philosophy... to his publication of Ideas in 1913" and On the Death and Life of Languages by Claude Hagege (again, Yale University Press)
which "seeks to make clear the magnitude of the cultural loss
represented by the crisis of language death" -- the rate of attrition
comes in at the loss of 25 languages each year.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: language, rsb
PermalinkComments (0)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Thursday 26 February 2009
Oldest English words identified
The BBC tells me that "some of the oldest words in the English and other Indo-European languages have been identified":
Reading University researchers say "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the oldest in use and could date back thousands of years.
Using a computer model, the team analysed the rate of change of words and say they can predict which are likely to become extinct.
They believe "squeeze", "guts", "stick" and "bad" could become obsolete first (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: language
PermalinkComments (7)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Thursday 29 January 2009
Best Translated Book of 2008
I should have linked to this earlier, Three Percent's Best Translated Book of 2008: Fiction Finalists:
-
Tranquility by Attila Bartis, translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein (Archipelago) (Overview)
-
2666 by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) (Overview)
-
Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (New Directions) (Overview)
-
Voice Over by Céline Curiol, translated from the French by Sam Richard (Seven Stories) (Overview)
-
The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederik Hermans, translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke (Overlook) (Overview)
-
Yalo by Elias Khoury, translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux (Archipelago) (Overview)
-
Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (New Directions) (Overview)
-
Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge, translated from the French by Richard Greeman (New York Review Books) (Overview)
-
Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Carolina De Robertis (Melville House) (Overview)
-
The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig, translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg (New York Review Books) (Overview)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: awards, blogosphere, language
PermalinkComments (0)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Thursday 02 October 2008
Credit crunch
Oxford University Press has announced its Word of the Year. It's ...credit crunch!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, language
PermalinkComments (0)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Wednesday 16 July 2008
The 50 outstanding literary translations from the last 50 years
The Translators Association of the Society of Authors celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. To mark the occasion they have compiled a list of the 50 outstanding literary translations from the last 50 years.
Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style comes in at the top spot, but there is no room for Edith Grossman's Don Quixote.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, language
PermalinkComments (2)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Thursday 10 July 2008
Walter Benjamin's 1940 Survey of French Literature
Via the New Left Review, Walter Benjamin's 1940 Survey of French Literature:
Paris, 23 March 1940
Dear Monsieur Horkheimer,
It is over a year since I sent you my last résumé of French literature. Unfortunately it is not in literary novelties that the past season has proved most fertile. The noxious seed that has sprouted here obscures the blossoming plant of belles-lettres with a sinister foliage. But I shall attempt in any case to make you a florilegium of it. And since the presentation that I offered you before did not displease, I would like to apologize in advance for the ways in which the form of the following remarks may differ (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: language, philosophy, walter benjamin
PermalinkComments (0)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Thursday 16 August 2007
Tu and vous
Great debate over at Languagehat on how best to translate tu and vous:
In Orlanda, by Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman, one of the characters suddenly switches from the formal “vous” to the informal “tu.” This is a crucial moment in the narrative. The speaker is a prissy, bourgeois woman of thirty-five. She is addressing a young man with whom she entertains a somewhat ambiguous relationship. For the Francophone reader, this unwitting switch from “vous” to “tu” signals an important shift in the woman’s feelings. The problem for the translator is how to convey this to the English-speaking reader ...
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, language
PermalinkComments (1)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Thursday 31 May 2007
Separated by a common language
Nice: separated by a common language -- "Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK." (I can now spell "separate" correctly each time I type it because Mrs Book, a teacher, told me t'other day that "there is a rat in separate" -- genius!)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, language
PermalinkComments (0)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Monday 07 May 2007
Rosen's Lingua Franca
Tonight, on BBC Radio 3, a new series called Lingua Franca: "Michael Rosen embarks on the long and winding linguistic road through the roots of European language."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: language
PermalinkComments (0)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Thursday 29 June 2006
Zukofsky: the definite article
Last night, I read Charles Bernstein foreword to Prepositions + : The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky (Wesleyan University Press -- Prepositions is part of The Wesleyan Centennial Edition of the Complete Critical Writings of Louis Zukofsky).
Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978) was one of the Objectivist poets, a group of second-generation, mainly American Modernists (Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Lorine Niedecker and the British poet Basil Bunting) who emerged in the 1930s heavily influenced by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (the only poet to be published as both an Objectivist and an Imagist poet). Bernstein's essay is only very short, but it’s a useful piece for situating Zukofsky. In it he quotes Zukofsky's famous statement that:
... a case can be made out for the poet giving some of his life to the use of the words a and the: both of which are weighted with as much epos and historical destiny as one man can perhaps resolve. Those who do not believe in this are too sure that the little words mean nothing among so many other words."
Zukofsky's provocation made me think, again, about language, poetry and truth: issues far too big to say much of worth about here and now. But the care with which a good poet tends to language, even to the tiniest words, is instructive. Between the definite article and the indefinite article there is an entire universe; infinity lies between a and the.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: language, poetry
PermalinkComments (1)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Monday 17 April 2006
Balderdash and Piffle and the OED
First shown in January and February 2006, Balderdash and Piffle was a major BBC TV series, shown in the UK, which helped to update the Oxford English Dictionary. To accompany a follow-up programme, shown yesterday, you can freely use OED Online for the next week.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: language
PermalinkComments (0)Related PostsEmail to Friend
Monday 20 February 2006
Queneau in patois
Raymond Queneau's story from Exercises de style translated into Jamaican patois by Ria Bacon (via Ramage):
Now hear dis, mek Ah tell oonu, wa day de bus dem full up wid so much people dem. An ah see dere one dem jump up good fuh nutten boasie maaga jancro wid him winjy neck fit fe choke, ah tell yah bwai! ‘im a fix a ribbon an ‘is ‘at fenky-fenky come een like ‘im Selassie ‘isself, yaah! Smady cut yai an’ ‘im vex an’ bawl some faasty nying’i-nying’i. It oht fi mek one kass-kass, ah’m tellin’ yah. Cho! ‘im nah tallowah doh an’ ‘im jus’ kiss ‘im teet’ an’ a go cotch far dereso quick quick.
Kiss mi nek, nah tree hower layta me see ‘im gen laba-laba wid ‘im breddah oo seh ‘im muss put ‘im button likkle more higher depan ‘im coat so, seen?
Jack Mandora
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, language
PermalinkComments (2)Related PostsEmail to Friend
|