Robin Myers on Hosts and Guests
"When I translate, I am not merely a guest in the Spanish language or in the culture of the poem or story or novel I’m translating; I’m also made more aware of being a guest in my own. No: not my own, because I don’t own it. I translate into English not because it’s 'mine,' my 'mother tongue,' my 'dominant' language, but because I have learned it immersively and will never stop learning it."
via WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
James Shea on Yam Gong's "Startling Hair"
"My co-translator Dorothy Tse and I, however, took a small gamble by shifting to present tense for the speaker’s memories. We felt there was an opportunity to signal the fluid sense of past and present in the Chinese, so we used an em dash to prepare the reader for a shift in temporal perspective. Tense cannot be avoided in English, so by mixing verb tenses in the translation, we tried to dislodge the reader from being fixed in a single tense." |
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