Margaret Jull Costa

In response to a question, her admission that her pleasure in translating wasn’t out of a particular interest in Spanish or Portuguese literature so much as it was an interest in the English language elicited a palpable reaction. Even if this seemed an obvious point, I felt I’d had an epiphany: a great translator is, first and foremost, a great reader – and, following that, a great writer as well.

Seraillon reports on a great talk by translator Margaret Jull Costa in San Francisco, a lecture organized by the Center for the Art of Translation.

Hopscotch soundtrack

Via one of my groups in Goodreads, all the jazz music played in Julio Cortázar's Rayuela can be listened to in Youtube (playlist 1 or playlist 2).

The music is in the 2001 album Jazzuela. Julio Cortázar y el Jazz (song list).

Enjoy! And, yeah, you can hop around the songs.

Translation talk with Chris Andrews

You could almost argue that [domesticating translation] brings the languages closer together, because it makes the original language version more familiar in a way. You can immerse yourself in the story when you’re not being alarmed by syntactic unfamiliarity.

You could make an argument for a certain degree of domestication in a first translation of an author to give the author a good chance of getting out there into the reading public. And I think what happens when an author becomes famous and well-loved and had a durable appeal, is that often a retranslation will be more foreignising — and this has happened recently with Dostoevsky, for example — people have retranslated Dostoevsky in a more foreignising way.

And does that alienate people?

Sometimes it alienates readers who are used to the earlier version. There’s also the issue of things being retranslated more for publishing reasons rather than literary reasons. There are already good translations out there but publishers know they can turn a dollar if they say, ‘this is the new and definitive version’, people will buy it.

More at Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Read Brazil

At Granta, three of their Best of Young Brazilian Novelists share three essential books by Brazilian writers.

2666 summer readalong

The Weblog is hosting a reading of 2666 by Roberto Bolaño this month and the next. It will be led by Spanish professor Patrick O'Connors.

The tentative discussion schedule is as follows:

7/12 – Part One
7/19 – Parts Two and Three
7/26 – Part Four - 1
8/2 – Part Four - 2
8/9 – Part Five - 1
8/16 – Part Five - 2