Deceptively simple: the shopworn phrase of the blurbing alchemist who would gild a leaden text with an effortless attribution of hidden complexity. Deceptive simplicity is often attempted and often diagnosed but rarely achieved. The world has many more Rod McKuens than Robert Frosts. Deceptively simple is deceptively hard. So when Goran Simić announces that he “would like to write poems which resemble newspaper reports,” the connoisseur of poetry is apt to balk. Why ever would anyone want that? Should not the rich, deliberate language of poetry oppose the rushed, plain, fact-obsessed prose of journalism? Isn’t this asking of poetry something that it cannot and should not be made to do?
BTBA BYTES: Sentences from the Best Translated Book Award Longlist
Since 2008, the announcement of Three Percent's Best Translated Book Award has become something of an annual event for readers of literature in translation. This year's longlist, announced March 11th, is no exception: it reads like a veritable Who's Who of international literature. Weighing in at 25 books, it is broadly inclusive, featuring works translated from more than a dozen languages and published in a variety of formats (from commercial hardcovers to limited edition chapbooks). TIM KRABBÉ’S THE CAVE & DUTCH TRANSLATION by Elisabeth Gill
Dutch writer Tim Krabbé’s noir novel The Cave explores a choice and the unwitting corruption that follows from it. The most peculiar feature of Sam Garrett’s English translation is that it accidentally exemplifies the kind of corruption Krabbé explores, but on a stylistic level. The weak passages of Garrett’s text are sins of obedience where the closest rendering to Dutch no longer works in English—though at some point in the linked history of the two languages, it might have. That’s precisely the sort of shortfall Krabbé warns against in The Cave: the ease of being influenced, of losing track of one’s fundamental responsibility. The Dutch text in its English version mirrors the novel's preoccupation with small failings.
Tours Elegy: A Poem by Robert Melançon
The streets are the same
and not the same. No longer.
The Town Hall, the Courthouse, the cafés
are still there, the chairs scattered
under the plane trees on the terrace
before the splendid nineteenth-century edifices,
First and Second Empire. You’d recognize
the waiters at the Café de l’Univers.
On Translating Nelly Arcan + An Excerpt from Hysteric
There were two major challenges in translating this novel, and both are perfectly represented by the excerpt below.
The first concerns the habit that literary types have of seeing the act of writing as one of salvation. The idea that there’s something noble about crafting words, be it in the context of creation, translation or otherwise, that Art should save, or so the fantasy goes. Yet in Nelly Arcan’s case, Art was no saviour. What’s more, it feels at times, when delving deeper into her writings, that her Art only aggravated her obsessions, her hysteria. And so, having had to face her obsessions as translators daily for months, with her disorders made worse by her describing them in every minute, painful, awful detail—with the conclusion forgone since she killed herself in 2009—we could be forgiven for losing hope in the idea that Art is salvation.
Welcome to The New Biblioasis International Translation Blog
When
the Biblioasis International Translation
Blog was created in 2012, it was with the ambition of becoming an online
forum for literary translation in Canada and beyond. Although we got off to a decent start, with
feature articles from the likes of Douglas Glover, Alberto Manguel, Scott
Esposito and others, a litany of minor priorities—running a press? editing a magazine?
launching a brick and mortar bookstore? teaching university courses?—kept
getting in the way. Go
figure. Finite resources, limited energy, and ambition make for a precarious
dance. We're still working out the kinks in our steps.
