Category Archives: Literary translation

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Jennifer Croft is best known for being one of the English translators of Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. It is thanks to Croft’s English translation of the novel Flights that Tokarczuk made her international breakthrough, first with the  International Man Booker Prize, in 2018 (which Croft …

“Tokarczuk’s translated works have opened up life changing opportunities for her and helped boost Polish literature”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Hindu scholar and linguist Jeffrey Armstrong has spent the past 10 years translating and “decolonizing” the Bhagavad Gita, one of India’s most famous epic poems, written 5.000 (some say 7.000) years ago. His work was published this month with the title The Bhagavad Gita Comes …

“After centuries of “colonized” English translations of the Bhagavad Gita a Canadian scholar restores it to its original meaning”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Emily Wilson’s 2017 English translation of The Odyssey raised quite a stir for its its audacious use of contemporary language and her gender neutral approach (see our blog article on this topic) but the new English version of the epic poem Beowulf takes modernisation of …

“How far should we modernise language in literary translation? The case of the epic poem Beowulf”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village In Emily Wilson’s translations of the classics the Greek goddess Demeter has “cornrows in her hair”, Achilles is described as a “superhero”, and Odysseus, when disguised as an old, homeless man, carries a “tote bag”…(1) Wilson’s innovative approach to the translation of Homer’s Odyssey won …

“British scholar Emily Wilson’s fresh and contemporary translations of the Greek classics discussed at a recent Yale University event”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Fiona Bell is a literary translator and scholar of Russian literature, based in Oxford. She won a highly competitive fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in 2018, and her translation of Natalia Meshchaninova’s Stories received a 2020 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. If you …

“Russian literary classics set in 2020: updates to Russia’s greatest books”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “Planet Word”, opening up in Washington DC on October 22, 2020, will be an interactive center dedicated to language arts. Its mission is to inspire a love of words and language and the project is grounded in the belief that language and literacy are the …

““Planet Word”, an interactive museum dedicated to language, opening up soon in Washington DC”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Publishers around the world are reporting booming sales of “The Plague” (La Peste), an allegorical tale set in a town at the mercy of an epidemic, written by French Nobel prize writer Albert Camus in 1947. Penguin is rushing through a reprint of its English translation …

“New English version of Camus’ “The Plague” during Covid-19: how historical context can affect translation”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village In 1983 Italian academic, historian, semiologist, journalist and author Umberto Eco published his first novel, Il nome della rosa (The name of the rose). The book became a literary event almost overnight and was on the best-seller list practically everywhere for months. It was translated …

“Translating “The name of the Rose”, an example of a linguistic quality assurance process applied to literature”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The French film Les traducteurs (The Translators) premiered last year in November at the French Film Festival in Prague. The plot follows a group of nine talented polyglots charged with translating the third installment of a fictitious Daedalus trilogy, a series of novels that, with …

““Literary lockdown”: how the translation of a novel by a best selling author made for a thriller film plot”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Neologisms related to the coronavirus pandemic are spreading so fast that it is hard to keep up and our article on this topic  of March 25 is already out of date! We have picked up some new terms here and there from different sources in …

“Elephant in the zoom, Le Creuset wrist, and cough-shaming: how Covid lingo is creeping into our every day language”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “Multiples”, is an anthology of multiple translations edited by world-acclaimed British novelist Adam Thirlwell and published in 2013. Thirlwell chose 12 stories, written in Danish, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, German, Arabic, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Italian, Hungarian and English, and asked the sixty-one writers who accepted to take …

““Multiples”, 12 short stories in 18 languages by 61 authors, a captivating experiment in translated literature”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), was a writer, journalist, art critic, art dealer and publisher who “shook up the world of literature” in the early 1900s by inventing a new literary genre: the “news in three lines.” (1) Fénéon was employed by the the French daily Le …

“Félix Fénéon’s three-line “nouvelles”, an experiment in haiku journalism and insightful snapshot of life in the “Belle Epoque””