“It may come to us as something of a shock to realise that many of the texts that we treat as English originals are in fact translations, some from other languages, some from older forms of English, some from both. The Bible, The Iliad, Beowulf, the works of Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hugo, Goethe, […]
Aleksandra Lojek-Magdziarz writes for the Guardian on Polish matters. She is certainly on top of her brief. Check this out from August 1st: “Are Poles in Britain really starting to go home? Right now, I have no plans to do so, but you never know.” Note the effortless shift from “Poles” to “me.” She continues […]
A good thing about the internet is it allows you to check if that vague feeling you had about the lie of the media land is correct. The vague feeling I had – vague because I don’t monitor newspapers – was that there has been a rash of articles about how this recession is not […]
“‘Modern art is actually a means of espionage. … If you know how to read them, modern paintings will disclose the weak spots in US fortifications, and such crucial constructions as Boulder Dam.’” This is not the paranoid ravings of some modern-day war on terror nut. It is quoted in Who Paid the Piper? The […]
These are exciting times with banks crashing, insurance companies being nationalised (by GW Bush!) and so forth. Back on page 33 of today’s Guardian there is an article headlined “Merrill Lynch boss to get $11m payoff after nine months’ work.” The same man, John Thain, was given $15 million just for taking the job. He […]
The fledgling discipline of Walking Studies finally looks set to emerge onto the world stage as more and more scholars start to take it seriously, no longer regarding it as an unscientific field of study, or at best an adjunct to Running Studies. In the early years of this globalised new millenium it has started […]
Susan Bassnett is a leading representative of the translators are great school of thought, a school which holds that translators are as good – oh, hell, why not come out and say it – actually better than original (or rather, “original”) writers. I wouldn’t deny that translation is a creative activity – not after working […]
This is something I’ve been going on about in Our Man in Gdansk for some time now. This time, the book in question, though Polish, is available in an English translation by the highly regarded translator Bill Johnston. I refer to Andrzej Stasiuk’s 9. Look at the mess on page 6: To the right there’d […]
Here’s the RTE (Irish TV and Radio) news website today. It was also on air in more or less the same form: Employers earlier warned that future investment by multinational companies could disappear with many job losses if they were forced to recognise unions. No big deal there, just the usual threats. But here’s where […]
The belief that the translation should be free of the original, which some would have you believe is no more than a necessary evil, is an obsession in some areas of translation studies. Here’s Theo D’haen in his article “Antique Lands, New Worlds? Comparative Literature, Intertextuality, Translation” taken from a special number of the Forum […]
