Ersi Sotiropoulos at CAT, part II
As a follow-up to my earlier post, the Center for the Art of Translation’s interview with Karen Emmerich about translating Landscape with Dog and Other Stories is now up, check it (and the great blog) out. A favorite passage:
[Karen Emmerich:] … In these stories specifically, plot often seems incidental, secondary to language and to image. It isn’t poetic language, in the usual understanding of that phrase. It’s often very flat, very bare-bones. And the stories sometimes seem like a series of still-lives, freeze frames that show a life or a relationship—from the most involved to the most tenuous—captured at a particular moment, in a particular (sometimes disturbing or estranging, but often tender and fragile) configuration.
SE: … What kind of challenges does this pose to you as the translator? In prose that has been this carefully worked, do you feel like you can adequately bring across things like rhythm and sound?
KE: It’s enormously challenging as a translator—you don’t feel the kind of freedom you sometimes do, with fiction writers for whom plot drives a piece. You have an added sense of responsibility. Not necessarily to rhythm and sound, in this case, but to phrasing. If every word belongs where it is, what do you do when all the words go away and you have to find new ones to take their place?
Tags: Ersi Sotiropoulos, interviews, Karen Emmerich, the Center for the Art of Translation
