June 2013
2 posts
“Being happy, after all, surmounts and surpasses all frailty and strength. Happiness is the shakiest of things and yet also the most solid.”
—Robert Walser, Microscripts.
February 2013
2 posts
Play
January 2013
1 post
“Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude.”
—Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs
November 2012
2 posts
September 2012
1 post
August 2012
3 posts
Play
Play
July 2012
2 posts
June 2012
9 posts
Who
David Byrne & St. Vincent
After listening to their first single, “Who,” we can’t wait for the release of Love This Giant, the collaboration between David Byrne and St. Vincent.
Lo Que Se Pierde / What Gets Lost
I keep translating traduzco continuamente
entre palabras words que no son las mías
into other words which are mine de palabras a mis palabras.
Y, finalmente, de quién es el texto? Who has written it?
Del escritor o del traductor writer, translator
o de los idiomas or language itself?
Somos fantasmas, nosotros traductores que viven
entre aquel mundo y el nuestro
between that world and our own.
Pero poco a poco me ocurre
que el problema the problem no es cuestión
de lo que se pierde en traducción
is not a question
of what gets lost in translation
sino but rather lo que se pierde
what gets lost
entre la ocurrencia -sea de amor o de desesperación
between love or desperation-
y el hecho de que llega
a existir en palabras
and its coming into words.
Para nosotros todos, amantes, habladores
as lovers or users of words
el problema es éste this is the difficulty.
Lo que se pierde what gets lost
no es lo que se pierde en traducción sino
is not what gets lost in translation, but rather
what gets lost in language itself lo que se pierde
en el hecho, en la lengua,
en la palabra misma.
Alastair Reid
“…it is crucial for us to think carefully and clearly about the weight that dictatorships all over the world attribute to language: to how it is used, and to what end, and by whom. Oppressive regimes have an incontestable penchant for dominating, corrupting, and stultifying language. Despotic regimes are willling to go to extraordinary lengths in their usually successful, tragic official efforts to control, restrict, and narrow access to the spoken and written word. Imprisoned writers, banned books, censored media, restrictions on translations, even repeated attempts to abolish what are called “minority” languages…are all clear indications that tyrannies take language, books, and access to information and ideas very seriously -much more seriously than democracies do. George Orwell’s ghastly vision in 1984 of the creation of Newspeak and its intended consequence -the conscious perversion of thought processes in those who are exposed to impoverish language and diminished communication- is not, as we have come to realize, pure dystopian fiction but a reflection of tendencies toward oppression that already exist in our history-battered world, the proclivities toward subjugation that we ignore at our own peril and must resist wherever and whenever they appear.”
—Gorssman, Edith. Why Translation Matters. Yale University Press, 2010. pp. 53-54.
