When autumn comes, the leaves fall off of the trees onto the ground. Actually, I should say it like this: When the leaves fall, autumn is here. I have to work on improving my style. Last time the teacher wrote: Style, wretched. It’s upsetting but there’s nothing I can do about it. I like autumn.
Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises. Vol. 2 (1683–84), the first known manual of printing
i.
J. M. begins his book,
Every thought taken up from the block with a roll
Of the ball and inked on the form,
A Craft of the Hand which cannot be taught by Words:
“I thought to have given these Exercises
The title of Doctrine of Handy-Crafts but when I considered
The true meaning of the word I found the Doctrine
Would not bear it, therefore I shall not undertake
Not too old, not young anymore,
almost three dozen years gone by.
Not a failure, not a success—
One morning, almost fifteen years ago, I woke up from a dream that was so vivid and powerful that I knew it must be true. I still remember both what happened in the dream and the feelings it left me with.
The art of translation isn’t primarily about words. It’s about doing in your language, as a whole, what the original writer is doing in his or her language as a whole—and sometimes about reconsidering, or reimagining, what that language is.
My joke to friends during the years I was working on Anniversaries was that on the one hand it’s almost two thousand pages long, but on the other hand, it’s the slowest and hardest book I’ve ever translated.
This week marks the publication in English of one of the great novels of New York City, and of the twentieth century: ‘Anniversaries,’ by the German writer Uwe Johnson. This is the first of three essays by the translator, Damion Searls.
The Nazis had not generally been interested in psychological insight. Now the test would be used to gain insight into the Nazis themselves.
We’re away until January 4, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year!Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and the role of the first person.It can be staggering to realize, suddenly, that something you’v…
Robert Walser’s scrupulous art of translation.Today is International Translation Day, an occasion of particular piety among the few who observe it. Translation, that glorious service to culture and human understanding!There are failures, too, though.…
Nietzsche on education, inequality, and translation. When I went off to college, it wasn’t, as far as I could tell, the result of any decision. The assumption—the fact—was simply there, in my family or high school or race and class or wherever…
Learning a word from John Ashbery.It started, as things sometimes do, with an Ashbery poem: “Staffage,” from his book A Wave. The poem is more than thirty years old now, and it’s remarkable how well it captures the generation then just being born: …
How rebracketing gives us new words.
How is a helipad like a cheeseburger? It’s all about arms being legs, and having an ear.There are words that sound right in a language and words that sound wrong, and the latter often, as the gangsters say, go o…
How the Erie Canal changed our vowel sounds.One thing you can learn from Timescapes, the surprisingly moving twenty-two-minute video at the Museum of the City of New York, is how big a deal the Erie Canal was. In the early nineteenth century, New Yor…
Translating Jon Fosse from Norwegian.Norwegian is a language that English-language writers and translators seem willing to pick up: James Joyce learned it to read Ibsen; Lydia Davis is learning it to read, and solely by reading, Dag Solstad; and I le…
Looking to the stars to find Dante’s birthday.The exact date of Dante Alighieri's birth is, authorities say, unknown. For his sesquiquincentenary (that's 750th) in 2015, the Vatican played it safe by starting its celebrations on May 4, with Pope Fran…
What is poetry? Etymology provides more questions than answers.T. S. Eliot, who once famously called National Poetry Month the cruelest, was also one of many to point out the hopeless semantic tangles that ensue because “poetry” has two opposites…
More on automated sentiment-analysis, and Moby-Dick.Paul Valéry tells the story: The painter Edgar Degas was backhanded-bragging to his friend Stéphane Mallarmé about the poems that he, Degas, had been trying to write. He knew they weren’t great…
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and the role of the first person.It can be staggering to realize, suddenly, that something you’ve never thought about—something you’ve always accepted as real—is just an article of faith. Language is often what turns t…
Adventures in dictionaries.I.
In the novel by Patrick Modiano I’m translating, a bus stops at Cross Road in Bournemouth “devant un cottage pimpant,” and I had a feeling, somehow, that my first try, “in front of a pimpin’ little cottage,” wa…
Naming wines in translation.If, to bedazzle your beau or belle, your tastes often turn to thoughts of white tablecloths and candlelight, your thoughts will likely turn to tastes of wine.But which wine? It can be hard to navigate those artisanal descr…
But shouldn’t that be the other way around?Like Thomas Wyatt, who can’t quite let go, I can’t quite let go of that Wyatt poem about what she hath deserved. He says in it that love was not just a dream: “It was no dream, I lay broad waking.” T…
Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee From Me” and the history of the word deserve.The best I-just-got-dumped pop song ever, beating out such classics as “Wild World,” “Don’t You Want Me,” “Nothing Compares 2 U,” “You Oughta Know,” and “I…
December through the eyes of an Elizabethan poet.It is now definitely December. Another November survived, and a grim November it was, too, the month Thoreau used to call November Eat-heart—days “as will almost oblige a man to eat his own heart,…
The rhythms of overheard speech.In Martin Walser’s 1987 book Brandung, about a German professor teaching abroad at the very un-German University of California, Berkeley—a novel really not worth reading unless you are interested in German-English tr…
How our coins got their names.Election Day is here again, and I know there are some single-issue voters out there who haven’t forgotten an issue of our time that Congress has repeatedly failed to act on, despite the introduction of bills HR 3761 in…
On a sentence by Robert Walser.It is worth remembering that there once was a time when every letter, number, and punctuation mark printed on paper started life as a sculpture. Someone had to make the letterforms by hand, in three dimensions; the indi…
Remembering Saint Jerome on International Translation Day.Raise a glass, say a prayer in a language other than Hebrew and Greek, or wear a donkey’s ear in your buttonhole: it’s International Translation Day, aka the Feast of Saint Jerome, the pat…
You must have seen them: these small towns and tiny villages of my homeland. They have learned one day by heart and they scream it out into the sunlight over and over again like great gray parrots. Near night though they grow preternaturally pensive.