Welcome to Hopscotch Translation

Something awakened in me, and I felt that, no matter how, I wanted to help increase that number and be part of the change. When he and I met in person more than a decade ago, he had no clear answer as to why his oeuvre hadn’t been published more widely abroad—the mystery surrounding the shortage of his translated works was something of a closed book. It likely was at that moment that the seed was planted: I wanted to bring Miklós Vámos’s works to a much larger swath of the reading world… READ MORE

But one of the most exciting novelties is that we are writing about our work. We are speaking out. No longer are we wallflowers or merely “very careful readers.” With each word that I write about the love I feel for my work, I am literally revealing something of myself, stepping out of the shadows, and coming into a new existence. With this essay, for starters, I want to explain why I made certain decisions in the translation of Domenico Starnone’s complex masterpiece, Via Gemito… READ MORE

The question of translating a metaphor when there is no exact equivalence raises the issue of the “dose” of “foreignness” or “xenity” that it might be important, in a subtle way, to introduce into a translation. Some translators, and indeed some editors, think that a foreign text should be completely “Englished.” This is a necessary rule of thumb, but my personal viewpoint is more nuanced in certain situations. READ MORE

Of course, there’s no way one can’t help but explain or interpret here or there, especially with idioms and metaphors that require some extra finessing to live in the target language, but as a goal I think it’s a necessary one. (And any ‘failures’ to adhere to the original aren’t failures, in my eyes, so much as another reason as to why more versions, not fewer, are the way to approach translation. The mystery has many ways of being conveyed, each translator using their own methods of dis- and reassembly.) … READ MORE