Good morning,

Today we celebrate something that I think of as sort of a magical mystery – it’s translating other people’s literary works into another language.

This topic was inspired by this lovely Economist obituary of Anthea Bell. As a reminder, the Economist obituaries are the finest writing you get to read every week, they are written by Ann Wroe and are amazing celebrations of what is weird and interesting about people. Get on this train:

At the desk where she worked in her small house in Cambridge, she looked out at the garden through two panes. One was modern, perfectly transparent; the other old, with small distorting flaws. She felt she was the second, interpreting freely rather than literally. What mattered was to spin the illusion that the books she translated—chiefly from French and German, though she had learned Danish, over a single Christmas, for Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales—had originally been written, even thought, in English.

https://www.economist.com/obituary/2018/11/03/obituary-anthea-bell-died-on-october-18th

And now – getting a bit topical here – we come to Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante. Ferrante fans, are you excited for the HBO series which is coming this actual month? If you are not a Ferrante fan, she’s been very involved in the TV show so there is reason to believe this will be a great intro to her world. Here’s Ann Goldstein talking about what it is like to inhabit that world:

With The Days of Abandonment, partly because it was the first one and partly because it is so haunting, and it’s so concentrated, I was very upset by it. There were things in it that I think everyone recognizes. Like the scene with the key where she thinks she’s locked herself in—I have trouble with keys. And with something like that, she’s writing your nightmare. Those things really did upset me and haunt me. I identified with the narrator—one naturally identifies to some extent with an “I” female narrator going through something that you recognize whether you’ve gone through it or not. But many times with Ferrante there’s a point where I feel that I wouldn’t do that, so then I would be really upset by thinking, “Oh, what is this person doing, what’s going to happen, where’s she going to go?”

https://www.guernicamag.com/the-face-of-ferrante/

Finally, here’s Katrina Dobson on translating Clarice Lispector, who is  influenced by yet more languages. This is why translating is such an incredible thing! How can you convey that! And yet people do:

In translating Clarice Lispector, I thought about her relationship to Portuguese as the child of immigrants who spoke with an accent and who brought other languages into the home—Yiddish and Hebrew. Lispector clearly dominates the Portuguese language in her writing yet makes these deliberate distortions that I feel must have started from having that window onto other languages that comes with being part of a diasporic community.

https://asterixjournal.com/conversation-katrina-dodson/

Happy Friday! Hope you’ve got some good stuff on,

Alex xx.