Translator Carlos Ferrero quotes bit of a piece called Aprender a ser libre (Learning to be free) by Jorge Edwards, whose work had the singular distinction of being banned by both the Castro and Pinochet dictatorships: I recall a Venezuelan poet of Arab origins who was contracting as a translator in North Korea. The documents…
News that pornstar Dolly Buster used to work as a translator for the Bundesgrenzschutz, the old German federal border guards, reminds me vaguely of translation and interpreting’s original Mata Hari, Malinche, who got naked with, and told all her people’s secrets to stout Cortez. Or, as Mexican national mythology has it, parented the first Mexican…
Abdou Diouf, “Secretary-General of la Francophonie and former President of Senegal”, responding to Chirac in the former organisation’s first meeting outside France, in a Ceausescu palace in Bucharest: the notion of culture from a US standpoint is understood to mean entertainment rather than the expression of peoples’ souls and identities. I’ve read quite a lot…
I’ve been translating quite a lot of elderly Flemish over the past few months. Here’s an excerpt from some manuscript memoirs found in the municipal archives of Ditverstaanzetochniet: An ivory trader on the Congo River has been suffering severe depression as a result of harrassment by an inquisitive steamboat captain speaking defective French. He decides…
Dear City of Vic, I’m sure you’re serious about Europorc–I certainly am–but no one would guess so from the English translation of the convention site. (Vic has more problems of this type.)
The Dutch cartoonist LJ Jordaan seems to have enjoyed portraying Francisco Franco as a woman. Here he is receiving US aid from Eisenhower in parody of the Dutch tradition of Santa Claus being a Spanish bishop who arrives on a steamboat, and here Don Juan (de Borbón) seeks to win him (in German translation of…
I’ve just read chunks of White on Black by Ruben Gallego (available in Spanish as Blanco sobre negro), an extraordinary collection of glimpses of a childhood spent struggling with cerebral palsy in Soviet institutions. The author was dumped there, aged 1, by his maternal grandfather, Ignacio Gallego, secretary-general of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), who…
Someone just quoted me a bit of Clément Marot I didn’t know (OK, let’s be honest: I’d didn’t even know Marot): En tant qu’Ouy et Nenny se dira, Par l’univers le monde me lira. Which Leigh Hunt (The Companion, 1828) translates as: As long as Love says Yes and No, The universe shall read Marot.…
It may not have worked, but nineteenth century medicine often sounds rather fun. This from An Epitome of Braithwaite’s Retrospect of practical medicine and surgery (1860): M. Lallemand, of Montpellier, has great confidence in aromatic bitters, to which a small portion of brandy has been added, followed by active friction of the loins… As internal…
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