Life behind an Author’s Works—Memoir of a Translator: How I - download pdf or read online

By Danuta Borchardt

ISBN-10: 1521040419

ISBN-13: 9781521040416

This ebook is my memoir of translating from Polish into English the novels of Witold Gombrowicz, one of many maximum writers of the twentieth century. John Updike has defined him as “A grasp of verbal burlesque, a gourmet of mental blackmail … one of many profoundest of overdue moderns, with one of many lightest touches.”
The memoir covers approximately two decades of my lifestyles, from the Eighties to the mid-2000s. It bargains with the nitty-gritty of the craft, and art—because that’s what it is—of a literary translation. i've been gratified, and just a little stunned, that lots of my associates and associates chanced on the topic fairly interesting. now not so mind-blowing used to be the curiosity in passages, on the subject of titillating now and then, referring to my courting with my then husband Thom. As a local speaker of yank English, Thom used to be an important contributor to my efforts. additionally, the duty of translating from a local tongue into an bought language used to be an strange procedure in these days.
Let me draw right here a simile among the 1st line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—“Happy households are all alike; each unsatisfied kin is gloomy in its personal way”—and the method of translation, the place a few of the ideas are alike, yet each translator works in his or her personal manner, chuffed or not.
One of those ideas isn't to translate actually. until I violated this rule at any time when priceless, i couldn't have conveyed the strangeness of Gombrowicz’s cutting edge prose in Polish right into a strangeness in English and, as well, to be presented for it.
To persist with up at the subtitle—how I got here to translate the novels of this author—let me take a step again. As a Polish teenage refugee in London within the early Nineteen Forties, in the course of the bombing via Germans with V1s and V2s, I discovered English by means of immersion. This was once enough to graduate from highschool, from clinical university and perform as a psychiatrist. even though, it used to be no longer enough, while I stuck the trojan horse, in my fifties, for writing literary prose. It required loads of perform. with out this, whilst I later stuck the malicious program to translate Gombrowicz, i couldn't have properly rendered his appealing prose into English.
To relay the lifestyles at the back of Gombrowicz’s works referred to as for synchrony among the author’s mind set and writing, and my very own. Contrariness of brain, quirkiness in expressing it. my very own literary writing, realized with the sweat of my forehead, supplied a very good and worthwhile preparation.
In precis, i'm hoping to express in my memoir the buzz of translating terribly tricky texts, and the buzz, frequently painful, of my existence with the fellow to whom I owe gratitude for assistance during this stupendous endeavor.

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Life behind an Author’s Works—Memoir of a Translator: How I came to translate Witold Gombrowicz and the Many Faces of Thom by Danuta Borchardt


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