Out of the Wings

‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Translating’ – who says Twitter isn’t useful?

‘Picadorbooks is now following me on Twitter’ apparently, leading me to this interesting post on its blog about translating by Stephen Sartarelli. It may be about prose translation, but it gives an insight into the thought processes involved in the task.

Sartarelli writes on the difficulties of translating the language (‘linguistic stew’) used by Andrea Camillieri in his novels. Camilleri distorts Italian, distancing the native reader from the language. How to recreate this distancing effect in the foreign reader? ‘One does what one can’, Sartarelli states. Resigned to the inadequacy of his efforts, he nevertheless gives us some of his strategies for rendering this author’s idiosyncratic dialect into English. For once – he concludes – translation is ‘fun’:

my wife, I say, nearly fainted when, passing by my open study door as I was working hard on my first Camilleri novel, she actually heard me laughing.

Gives us all hope, then!

http://www.panmacmillan.com/picador/ManageBlog.aspx?BlogID=8850aef3-e0c9-46f1-81f1-13ed8092b11d

Tags:

Leave a Response

  • King's College London Logo
  • Queen's University Belfast Logo
  • University of Oxford Logo
  • Arts and Humanities Research Council Logo
Out of the Wings

© 2010 King's College London