All tagged translation

Beowulf

Beowulf

Chris Mathers Jackson
Poetry, The Classics

Maria Dahvana Headley’s new translation of the iconic Old English poem, Beowulf (2020) presents modern readers with a perfect blend of direct translations of Old English phrases and hyperbolically contemporary verbiage. Indeed, she translate kenning (the compound word phrases frequently used in Old English poems) after kenning alongside words like “bro,” “hashtag,” and, yes, “fuck” (although the later may well have been frequently used among the warrior class of individuals depicted in Beowulf). What Headley presents is not traditional high poetry like that championed by many medievalist of yesteryear (among them the likes of Tolkien), but it is lyrical, delightfully readable, and very accessible. What’s more, it is arguably representative of the original feel of Beowulf’s oral roots. Alliterations and lyrical turns of phrase collide with 21st-century slang in Headley’s entertaining and approachable new translation of this oldest of English poems.

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Michiko Aoyama’s slender novel, What You Are Looking for is in the Library (2020, English translation 2023) connects a series of vignettes about largely disconnected individuals living in contemporary Tokyo. The central hub of the many spoked story is the community library with its large librarian who seems like a character who has stepped out of a Miyazaki film like My Neighbor Totoro.

When We Cease to Understand the World

When We Cease to Understand the World

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction, Nonfiction, My List of Required Reads

The late nineteenth and entire twentieth centuries reeked of industry and human innovation as humankind observed, dissected, and theorized about the nature of the universe, matter, everything vast and miniscule. In effect, mathematical and scientific theory attempted to define everything, everywhere, all at once (to borrow the phrase). The impact, as Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut demonstrates in When We Cease to Understand the World (2020), led to immense suffering on mass scale (WWI and WWII). This novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021 explores the cracks between fact and fiction, between progress and destruction, between genius and madness. Labatut’s book also investigates the private anguish, the inner misery of some of the world’s greatest minds. By interweaving history, math, physics, chemistry, and mathematics with a healthy dose of fiction, Labatut creates a wildly readable book that both educates and troubles, confounds and inspires. It is the perfect book to read in tandem with watching one of this summer’s blockbuster movies Oppenheimer as we consider the question of where that invisible line ought to be exist in the figurative sand of human innovation.

Valentino and Sagittarius

Valentino and Sagittarius

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics

Valentino and Sagittarius are two novellas, both by Italian modernist, Natalia Ginzburg, translated from their original Italian. Both novellas are told in first-person, from the perspective of a young adult woman, an insignificant daughter. Both include parents with seemingly unrealistic expectations for one of the narrator’s siblings. Both come to life in post WWII Italy as they grapple with the theme of disappointment and generational divides.

Babel: An Arcane History

Babel: An Arcane History

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

R. F. Kuang’s Babel: An Arcane History (2022) is a fantasy-inspired, alternate history of 1820 and 30s Britain and its relationship with the world beyond. As one might expect from the time period, Babel centers on themes of empire and colonialism. Oxford is the hub in Babel and not just for the academic study ongoing there. In the fantasy-like world building of Babel, Oxford houses the Tower, the center of colonial Britain’s translators’ world. In Kuang’s clever and moving novel, language and translation claim a power that creeps towards magic and provides the writer an eloquent metaphor through which to deconstruct the colonial project.

A Ghost in the Throat

A Ghost in the Throat

Chris Mathers Jackson
Nonfiction

Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s part memoir, part translation A Ghost In the Throat (2020) is, as she states from the beginning, “a female text” (3). In fact, lest her reader fail to absorb this, she titles her first chapter “a female text,” her first line of the first chapter (after the epigraph of a few stanzas of Eiblín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s “Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire” or “Keen for Art ó Laoghaire”) is all in caps (“THIS IS A FEMALE TEXT.”), and then her memoir concludes: “This is a female text” (282). It is clear, she means us all to associate her text, and Eiblín’s as well, with the female. As such, it is both organic and circular, dynamic and complex.