Published By The London Review Of Books, 8 November 2012

Published by the London Review of Books, 8 November 2012

In Anne Carson’s six translations of Ibykos, the mode of fidelity to the source text varies not according to the closeness of cross-lingual synonyms but according to the spirit of the translation. It is an extreme example of a translator bringing herself and her own ideas into a text, and also an effective one—if her goal is not to replicate Ibykos but to play with his work.

(cp. 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei [Eliot Weinberger, Octavio Paz]; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird [Wallace Stevens])

Someone just drew my attention to this, which I missed before.

Well that's not supposed to happen.

Well this sounds very interesting, and personally relevant. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the illusion of pure originality ever since I read this comment from Pablo Neruda, which Mykki Blanco tweeted a few days ago. Last week, a subscriber to my newsletter alerted me to the fact that some other person had started an email newsletter with a structure very similar to mine. “It seems like he’s copied your whole format,” wrote the reader, who was flatteringly indignant on my behalf. I told him that I appreciated him looking out for me, but that I try not to keep tabs on or worry about these things too much. I don’t own the idea of breaking up a newsletter into discrete sections, and I assume that most people subscribe to mine because of the substance of what I include, not due to the fact that I have created a unique new format. Because I haven’t. A few weeks before that, I had a conversation with a friend who’s an illustrator. She told me that younger artists sometimes ask her to divulge exactly which materials she uses—brushes, ink, paint, paper. She finds it insulting. She said she’d never give away such specific information, because to do so would be a tacit endorsement of other people copying her work. I told her that I didn’t think it was a big deal. All creators do a certain amount of ethical stealing, and no other artist could make the work that she does, even using the exact same materials, because she infuses everything with her point of view—which she owns completely. I would like to tell you I sounded wise, but I probably sounded like an asshole. Then today a friend tweeted about a new podcast that’s all about friendship. I felt a flash of annoyance: “Hey, we already have a podcast about friendship.” And I had to take a step back and remember that originality is not the virtue it’s made out to be. This is not friendship-podcast Highlander. There can be more than one—or two or three or four—excellent podcasts about friendship. It’s a big and important topic! And then I subscribed to the new podcast.  Obviously you don’t want someone passing off your words as their own or tracing your illustrations and republishing without attribution. But such instances of straight-up stealing are way less common, I think, than the petulant urge to protect your perceived originality from people who are merely making something similar. I’m putting this here to remind myself that next time I feel the desire to defend and clamp down on my work, it might be time to try making something new instead. And accept that even the new-for-me thing is not going to be totally original.

delightedbeauty.org

Shakespeare translation research project. Multilingual translations - all languages - all periods. Othello: case study, pilot project. Data visualisations.

Note also the project mentioned half-way down the page about translating the specific couplets. 

This conference is p awesome, so many amazing projects I’m learning about.