Yet another post about Bambi? I fear so. You see, the reader who asked me to compare the old translation by Whittaker Chambers with the new one only knew about one new translation (this one). But there is a another – the New York Review of Books edition by Damion Searls! Searls’ translation came out… Continue reading Bambi (part III)
Category: Book reviews
Bambi (part II)
See below for the introductory post about Bambi. This post compares the old translation and the new translation; let’s call them OT and NT. My edition of the OT was kindly purchased for me by my traumatized reader (see intro post) from a used book shop in Tennessee. It had previously been given as a… Continue reading Bambi (part II)
Bambi (part I)
I have a reader who maintains that Disney’s Bambi practically ruined what good disposition he had, if he had any. He’s also been haunted by the cold war since listening to the Army-McCarthy hearings in his crib, and one of the cold-war specters haunting him is Whittaker Chambers, who first translated Felix Salten’s Bambi into… Continue reading Bambi (part I)
Yet more translations of Parzival
Well, that was fast. After expressing a wish that A. S. Kline would live to complete his new verse translation of Wolfram’s Parzival, (as Chrétien de Troyes failed to do with his own Perceval), I got an email from him with a link to the finished product on April 14th. And I’m enjoying it very… Continue reading Yet more translations of Parzival
Krabat
“There’s a kind of magic that must be learned with toil and difficulty, line by line, spell by spell, the magic of the Book of Necromancy; and then there’s another kind that springs from the depths of the heart, from caring for someone and loving him. It’s hard to understand, I know, but you had… Continue reading Krabat
The Black Spider
And why not do evil that good may come? – as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just. (Romans 3:8) Die schwarze Spinne is an unsettling tale that dramatizes the terrible consequences of moral cowardice. The author, Swiss pastor Albert Bitzius (1797-1854), wrote under the pious pen name of Jeremias Gotthelf.… Continue reading The Black Spider
Clara Wieck Schumann (book review)
If you’ve ever read The Gulag Archipelago, you probably remember the story where nobody wanted to be the first to stop clapping for Comrade Stalin: The applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! […] They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! […] Nine minutes! Ten!…Insanity! To the last man!… Continue reading Clara Wieck Schumann (book review)
Is translation a bullshit job?
No. But it comes up occasionally in David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs, based on this much-shared essay (in lieu of a thorough review, I’ll just tell you that if you like that essay you’ll like the book). Graeber includes plenty of anecdotes from people languishing in pointless employment. One reads: My job is to oversee… Continue reading Is translation a bullshit job?
Three translations of Parzival
Translating Wolfram’s Parzival has got to be a total nightmare, though it’s probably also fun. His style is, by his own admission, comparable to a startled hare darting this way and that. This applies to individual sentences but also to the entire narrative. Some questions you may ask yourself when reading Parzival include: Did we… Continue reading Three translations of Parzival
Conservative dystopian futures
Some time ago on Twitter, another translator shared her dislike of conservative dystopian future fiction. I’d never thought to divide that particular genre into liberal and conservative subcategories, but it’s an interesting exercise. I suppose the former is driven by fear of oppression and/or a backlash against progress (see The Handmaid’s Tale) and the latter… Continue reading Conservative dystopian futures