On a Sentence from "Cold Nights of Childhood"
Maureen Freely
“I must navigate Tezer’s stream-of-electroshock-consciousness. This is not in any way a language challenge. It is an existential crisis. It carries with it the full force of all that came before. It runs its current through all that follows.”
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On a Sentence from "Siblings"
Lucy Jones
“But Elisabeth’s tone wavers between grief and criticism; grief at losing Konrad and criticism because he’s sold out to capitalism.”
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Translation Diary: Daniel Levin Becker on Laurent Mauvignier's "The Birthday Party" (Part 3)
Daniel Levin Becker
“No surprises? Well, perhaps a renewed sense of the power and complex majesty of this novel, its psychological acuity and attention to detail, its tautness in spite of its sprawl.”
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Translation Diary: Daniel Levin Becker on Laurent Mauvignier's "The Birthday Party" (Part 2)
Daniel Levin Becker
“Everything in The Birthday Party is deliberate and precise, even its imprecision, even its curious word choices, even the long and tortuous sentences unbothered by conventional methods of delivering or sequencing information.”
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Translation Diary: Daniel Levin Becker on Laurent Mauvignier's "The Birthday Party" (Part 1)
Daniel Levin Becker
“Haste suits The Birthday Party, which so often carries itself along with the propulsive momentum of thought, reading breathlessly even as it keeps dilating time to burrow into a moment, a memory, a perplexity, a silent wound.”
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On a Sentence from "I Who Have Never Known Men"
Ros Schwartz
“All along, I’d had a niggling sense that something was amiss, but I hadn’t been able to put my finger on what it was.”
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On a Sentence from “The Tree and The Vine”
Kristen Gehrman
“In Dutch, leuk is a simple, everyday word that could be translated a variety of ways depending on the tone and context.”
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On a Sentence from “Mansour’s Eyes”
Chris Clarke
“Girod’s long sentence takes on the form of the desert itself, rising and falling, shifting with breath and wind, ever-changing but never changing.”
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On a Sentence from “Imminence”
Alice Whitmore
“When I wrote to Dimópulos to ask her what on earth was going in these passages, she very kindly, very patiently, explained the Quiniela code to me. And yet, understanding was only half the battle—I now had to find a way to translate these passages into English.”
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On a Sentence from “Migratory Birds”
Julia Sanches
“In English, the whooping crane does not trumpet, just as, in other languages, roosters do not all cock-a-doodle-doo.”
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On a Sentence from “The Touch System”
Lisa Dillman
“There are words misheard, misspelled, and misunderstood. All things typographical reinforce this thematically, but at the sentence level, so does word choice.”
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