The Gift of Translation
Translating a great literary work is an exhausting process. We haven’t gone through the process, but we can imagine. The translator is an ambassador, a die hard enthusiast who brings to a wider audience the words of a foreign speaking writer. More than that, the translator has a supremely intimate relationship with the author. Spending so much time with the words, cadence and insinuations of another person’s language marks a strange and awesome experience. To elaborate, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky share with the Wall Street Journal the fruits that translation bears. Jacket Copy interviews Marcel Theroux about writing a novel that describes a very cold, very distant place, a Brown professor of poetry is chasing down the National Book Award, and John Banville weighs in on the current Nabokov discussion. Elsewhere, Seed Magazine debates whether evolution makes people altruistic or selfish, The Millions considers the masters of the short story, and Robert McKee gets his treatment in The Rumpus, which, in this case, can be translated a couple of different ways. — Kevin Murphy
– In “The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories,” the husband-and-wife translation team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated 11 of Leo Tolstoy’s shorter works. These include such classics as “The Kreutzer Sonata” and the adventure tale “The Prisoner of the Caucasus,” which Tolstoy wrote for “peasant children on his estate” but which is remarkably detailed and expressive. The duo, who live in Paris, have translated books by such writers as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekhov. Their best-known work, a translation of Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” was an Oprah’s Book Club pick in 2004. — Translation in the Wall Street Journal
– Waldrop’s musings on memory, art and death have produced some 20 books of poetry, but it would be a mistake to call him just a poet. An actor and director, he has helped found theater groups in Minnesota and Rhode Island, with offbeat names such as the Wastepaper Theater. He has taught at Brown for 41 years, where he is the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of Humanities. — Keith Waldrop in the Providence Journal
Very Cold, Very Distant
– When I was writing “Far North,” I was thinking a little bit about how the achievements of ancient Rome would have appeared to a Medieval peasant. For such a long time in Western history, the greatest technological and scientific achievements appeared to be behind us. It’s only now that we feel like we’re living at a cutting edge, and we feel that life is naturally linked to progress. But there’s nothing natural about that, if you look at history. — Marcel Theroux in Jacket Copy
– That Nabokov left behind an incomplete novel has been known since his death in a Swiss hospital in 1977; known, too, his instruction to his wife, Véra Nabokov—that if he died before finishing the book the draft was to be destroyed. His directive was disobeyed, as such directives frequently are—one thinks of Virgil and the Aeneid and, of course, of Kafka and Max Brod. — Disobedience in Bookforum
– The conflict between altruism and selfishness, good and evil, is an eternal theme in religion and literature. It also threatens to be an eternal controversy in evolutionary theory. Eric Michael Johnson’s review of Frans de Waal’s latest book emphasizes empathy and cooperation’s role in evolution, so as one of the original proponents of group selection theory, I’d like to use it in making some general points on where this debate currently stands. — Altruism in Seed Magazine
– The Best American Short Stories, of all the annual story anthologies, seems to have the biggest following among readers. The series has been around in one form or another since 1915 and has published short fiction by pretty much all of America’s best-known (and many more lesser known) practitioners of the form. — Short Stories in the Millions
– Robert McKee is best known to the world in two ways: as the guy who teaches the popular STORY seminar in Los Angeles and around the world to would-be screenwriters, and as the character in the film Adaptation who teaches a popular screenwriting seminar at which the Charlie Kaufman character is berated after standing up and asking tentatively and desperately, “Sir, what if a writer is attempting to create a story where nothing much happens? Where people don’t change?” — Robert McKee in The Rumpus
Video: Robert McKee in Adaptation
