Winter 2023 vol 12 no 2
Editorial
The opening and the closing sections of this issue worry, as is not uncommon in 91stMeridian, the forms and the consequences of translating.
The opening piece is a small tour de force by translation brothers-in-arms of many years, the non-Russophone classicist Reginal Gibbons and the Russophone poet Ilya Kutik: laying out some of their operating principles in approaching the notoriously difficult problem of carrying over Russian rhyme and etymology into English, they then offer three instances where these strategies are applied. Read their translations of Tsvetaeva's, Pasternak's and, yes, Kutik's own poems, and marvel.
Breaking in tone and style, the issue's middle section goes for farce, the absurd, comedy: an interpreter at an Argentinean fishing company's dreams of playing Leidi Macbeth; a young woman grows a sprawling, thorny passiontree between her and her needy father; political and musical animals roam the environs of Dhaka.
Bookending the issue are three micro-essays extracted from a conference panel on translators as "exophones," meaning--as the section's editor Mirgul Kali explains--working not from an acquired and into the "mother tongue" they are born into (often seen as the ideal path). Rather, these three young translators speak here to the ever-more-common condition of making themselves at home in English. What English gains is thus a reach into a huge range of world languages sometimes called "minor" in the sense that they aren't commonly learned, make that mastered, by your run-of-the-mill Anglophones. Here, Armenian, Bahasa Indonesia, Bulgarian. Does English lose anything in the process?
° Reginald Gibbons and Ilya Kutik: ”Translating Russian’s Poetic Energies: Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Kutik”
° Fictions:
Marina Porcelli, "The Story of Leidi Macbeth as Told by Marcia González at an Ungodly Hour"; translated from the Spanish by Derick Edgren Otero
Shani Pocker, “The Passionfruit/My Father's Visits”; translated from the Hebrew by Liat Graf
Mashiul Alam, "A Political Night at the Lakeshore"; translated from the Bengali by Moin Kadir
° On Being an Exophonic Translator: Jilavyan/Nenkov/Sanubari. A special section edited by Mirgul Kali
91st M 2023 vol 12 no 2
Reginald Gibbons and Ilya Kutik: ”Translating Russian’s Poetic Energies: Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Kutik”
Fictions:
- Marina Porcelli, “The Story of Leidi Macbeth as Told by Marcia González at an Ungodly Hour”
- Shani Pocker, “The Passionfruit /My Father’s Visits”
- Mashiul Alam “A Political Night at the Lakeshore”
On Being an Exophonic Translator: A special section edited by Mirgul Kali
