check out these categories:

American translators

Iranologists

Poets from Tennessee

Sufi poets

University of California, Berkeley alumni

this mf is a bit on Trillbilly’s podcast lol

  • Wertheimer [any]@hexbear.net
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    6 months ago

    I should read the Guerney and Fusso Dead Souls, too - I read the P&V and based on that and their Master and Margarita translation I think humor is their weak point. Speaking of which, if you come across a good translation of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, please let me know - the one I have (the John Cournos version) sometimes betrays that a joke has been translated, but never in a way that lets you know what was funny.

    Janet Malcolm demolishes (somewhat unfairly) P&V: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina/ (Pevear responds)

    Several years ago I developed a translation theory obsession, so a few recommendations from that binge -

    • David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (the most casually readable one on this list)
    • George Steiner’s After Babel (controversial but worthwhile)
    • Ezra Pound’s The ABC of Reading (I know, I know, Ezra Pound, but he and John Dryden are the godfathers of translation theory for poetry and this predates his fascism)
    • Barton Raffel’s The Art of Translating Poetry
    • Eliot Weinberger’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei