from If on a winter's night a traveler (Italo Calvino)
- Professor: Reading is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead ...
- Ludmilla: Or that is not present because it does not yet exist, something desired, feared, possible or impossible. Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.
Human Condition
“…the practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different—we speak different tongues and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same—that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of these suppositions, translation could not exist.” - David Bellos, near the end of Is That a Fish in Your Ear?
poetry & translation & history
Dante, Joachim du Bellay, Alexander Pope, Ludwig Tieck, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ezra Pound, Jacques Roubaud, Robert Lowell, C.K. Williams — think of a great poet, and you’ve almost certainly thought of a translator, too. In the Western tradition there is no cutoff point between writing poems and writing translations or writing poems in translation. Poetic forms — the sonnet, the ballad, the rondeau, the pantoum, the ghazal — have migrated among languages as diverse as French, Italian, Russian, Persian, English, and Malay over the last eight hundred years. Poetic styles — Romantic, Symbolist, Futurist, Acmeist, Surrealist — are common European properties, as typical of German as of Polish poetry. Every so-called poetic tradition is made of other traditions. Against the dubious adage that poetry is what is lost in translation we have to set the more easily demonstrable fact that, from many points of view, the history of Western poetry is the history of poetry in translation. - David Bellos, Is that a Fish in Your Ear? (emphasis added by me)
On Dictionaries
“To try to capture ‘all the words of a language’ is as futile as trying to capture all the drops of water in a flowing river. If you managed to do it, it wouldn’t be a flowing river anymore. It would be a fish tank.” - David Bellows, Is That a Fish in your Ear?
For breakfast, why not some lovely poems from the Futurist Cookbook as translated by Elsbeth Pancrazi? They’re featured on Loaded Bicycle, which recently launched. Be warned — the site is beautiful, intricate, and wholly original.
Two of my translations from THE FUTURIST COOKBOOK are up on the beautiful new Loaded Bicycle! Check it.
