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Category Archives: Lostintranslation

Russian Shakespeare

12 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by la Clarina in Lostintranslation, Theatre

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Boris Pasternak, Claudio Abbado, Dmitri Shostakovich, Grigorij Kozintsev, King Lear, Mahler Chamber Orchestra

King-Lear-1970-001Now this is rather different.

Back in 2003, in Ferrara, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Swedish Radio Choir held a curious concert. Grigorij Kozintsev‘s 1970 Russian King Lear was shown on a screen, while the orchestra, conducted by Claudio Abbado, performed a combination of Shostakovich‘s soundtrack and incidental music for a 1940 production of the play. Continue reading →

NaNoSomethingMo (and a small play thrown in)

03 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by la Clarina in Lostintranslation, Scribbling

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artificial deadline, Christmas plays, NaNoWriMo, road map, second draft, Translation

Noly-YN-DeadlineBecause I like an artificial deadline just as well as the next writer, I embarked on my own version of NaNoWriMo. More like NaNoReMo, because I intend to wrap up my second draft by the end of the month – and I know there is a thing called NaNoReMo, and it’s not in November, but never mind.

I embarked on it with the best of intentions and, one day in, I took it into my head to behead my novel. To cut the first three chapters, and start nearly two years later.

Oh, it does make sense – but I’m still reeling a little under the shock of the amputation… Besides, the first two days of November are holidays over here – meaning relatives and guests and family dinners, and graves to tend, and precious little time for writing…

Oh well, I told myself, I’m 2200 words behind, what with one thing and another – but never fear. I’m going to recover, starting tomorrow, ain’t I?

And right then the phone rings, and it is a local director asking do I have something small, and Christmassy – with children in it – something they can have ready by the middle of December?

And clearly I have maggots in my head, because instead of telling her that no, I’m sorry, and thank you for thinking of me – but no… what do I do? I hear myself say that why, yes – I have just the thing, only it’s in English, so I’ll need a few days to translate it…

I know, I know. I’m hopeless.

So last night I sat up very, very late, and translated like mad, and will do the same tonight, and try to follow my second-draft road map while sorting through the consequences of the beheading, and hope the local historian doesn’t turn up with his next chapter just now, and rehearse how to say “No. No. No, thank you. No. No. No. No…”

I’ll let you know.

Thou Art Translated

31 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by la Clarina in Lostintranslation, Theatre

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Kelly Monroe Johnston, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Peasant and Rogue Players, PlayOn!, shakespeare

Bless thee! Thou art translated!

Bless thee, Bottom…

You know the OSF and their PlayOn! project? The one about “translating” Shakespeare into contemporary English? We spoke about it a few posts ago, remember?

Well, here is Kelly Monroe Johnston’s take on the matter. Mr. Johnston is co-artistic director of the Rogue and Peasant Players, a New York-based company with a seriously Shakespearean background.

The company, it seems is “of about 11 minds on the issue”, but Mr. Johnston’s argument is a valid and interesting one: he says he is not afraid that the OSF’s translators will fail – but that they will succeed…

How so? Read the post to find out. Here is the link again.

Related articles
  • Shakespeare and film around the world (oup.com)

Easier?

15 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by la Clarina in Lostintranslation, Theatre

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Alexander Pope, Bill Rauch, bowdlerisation, James Shapiro, Nahum Tate, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, shakespeare, Translation

OSFSo it seems that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has commissioned new versions of Shakespeare’s plays. They took 37 playwrights and asked them to rewrite Shakespeare’s plays, to translate them into contemporary language.

Why, you may ask? Continue reading →

Oh dear…

13 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by la Clarina in Lostintranslation, Things

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revision, Translation, two jobs at a time

time-travel-clock2I. Big translation job. University press, collection of essays, hideously strict deadline. I was hired today, and they are already breathing down my neck.

II. Slightly smaller editing job. After months of silence, now they wake up and are, of course, in a hurry. And here’s the (long) new chapter, and can I finish it by Saturday, and when can they send the next?

 

III. Flu. Or perhaps not quite the flu, but still. I’m just beginning to feel vaguely human again, after three days of fever and cold.

IV. Revision – because yes, there is that, too.

To think that this morning my mother waltzed in, took a good look at her only daughter, and pronounced me in need of a little vacation… But the fact is that, for the next two or three weeks, I’ll barely have time to breathe… So I’m not even sure I’ll post very often or very brightly until, say, the end of October.

You are warned, O Readers: if you find Scribblings lagging behind, you know why.

 

 

 

 

The Iridescence of Vowels

28 Thursday May 2015

Posted by la Clarina in Eccentricities, Lostintranslation

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Arthur Rimbaud, Language, Myla Goldberg, Pronunciation, Synaesthesia, Translation

Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season I liked mostly for its use of the sound of language in imagery and as a narrative device.  I meant, things like this are just beautiful:

Consonants are the camels of language, proudly carrying their lingual loads. Vowels, however, are a different species, the fish that flash and glisten in the watery depths. Vowels are elastic and inconstant, fickle, and unfaithful.

Having mild synaesthesia, I’ve always associated sounds with colour. The luque-rimbaudiridescence of vowels I first found in Goldberg’s novel, and I fell in love with it: it was a little revelation, of the finding-words-for-a-hazy-thought variety. It is an idea I always use when trying to teach someone the joys, sorrows and mysteries of English pronunciation. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Continue reading →

The PolyglOwl and the Pussyglot

12 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by la Clarina in Eccentricities, Lostintranslation

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Edward Lear, Hugh Stewart, nonsense, the Owl and the Pussycat

OwlpussycatBecause the next Ad Alta Voce meeting will be all about literary cats, I was hunting through the Net for a suitable Italian translation of Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat*, when I stumbled on a website boasting no less than 126 translations of the poem in 111 languages… Continue reading →

A Map of Incomprehensibility

14 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by la Clarina in Lostintranslation

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incomprehensibility, languages, stereotypes

IncomprI found (well, I was directed to) this intriguing graph showing the equivalents of “It’s all Greek to me” in thirty languages.

It is a thing of interesting revelations – such as Spanish (Spanish?) being the epitome of fogginess to Germans and Macedonians, and Javanese entirely baffling the French… Continue reading →

Mapping English

07 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by la Clarina in Lostintranslation

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English language, infographics, maps, Vox

cvcFrom Vox, here is a collection of twenty-five maps and infographics showing the history, evolution and diffusion of English. Continue reading →

Happy Birthday, Shakespeare

24 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by la Clarina in History, Lostintranslation, Stories, Theatre

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#happybirthdayshakespeare, William Shakespeare

ShakespeareSo, this post is my answer to the Happy Birthday Shakespeare project, in which bloggers are invited to celebrate Will’s 450th birthday by posting about how his works impacted on their lives.

First things first, let me link to this thing I posted back in January, about my first Shakespeare ever. It is relevant to what I want to say. It tells how my very first Macbeth was an initiation. It was more than a little of a shock, too, and it marked eras in my perception of theatre: Before Macbeth, and After Macbeth.

And yet, it didn’t make me like it all of a sudden. It did not turn me into a rabid Shakespearian overnight. It didn’t even make me love English. That would be years later, and through another writer – who, ironically enough, hadn’t even been a native speaker. But it doesn’t matter now – or it only does in that my first impact with Shakespeare was through translations.

And my second, and third, and fourth…

It would be years before my English allowed me to appreciate Will’s works in the original, so I had to make do with translations, most of which were… well.

Let me state here that, much as I love to translate, my faith in literary translation is scant. Too many things are lost in the process, too many hues, and nuances, and shades, and implied meanings just cease to exist the moment you try to turn them into another language… And Shakespeare’s English, this rich, iridescent language that was incandescently moulding itself at the time, just has no equivalent in Italian.

I didn’t realise this back then, but the fact is, there are several Italian translations of Shakespeare’s works, often clever and accurate, I’m sure, but… but. I read them, I saw them played onstage, I liked the stories, but the translation was always there like a sheet of slightly opaque glass, dulling, dimming the experience.

Add to that the exasperating schoolbook habit of presenting any and every remarkable artist as a lonely star, shining and floating in a sort of vacuum…

So yes, I knew I should like Shakespeare, and indeed, did like his plays, but always had this disconcerting impression I should have liked him more. Somehow, I missed the vibrancy, and was left guessing at the power of the words.

Frustrating. Very much.

And then I learned English. I fell in love with the language, and never turned back. I started reading in English when I was eighteen, and within a few years I shyly tried my hand at Elizabethan English – both in reading and onstage – and found I loved it. It, and the time and place that had prompted this sort of language, this sort of theatre… History I’d always loved. Starting to read about Elizabethan England was a sort of homecoming. For some reason, I still cannot open a book – novel, essay, play – connected with Elizabeth’s time without feeling at home – and the more I read about the time, the life, the people, the more I understood and appreciated the plays.

So, no – it wasn’t perhaps love at first sight, but a love it was. A slow, long one, rooted in language and in history as much as in theatre, which is perhaps, in part, why it lasts the way it does.

 

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