Crossing Borders: Stories and Essays about Translation

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Editor)

Overview

In Joyce Carol Oates’s story “The Translation,” a traveler to an Eastern European country falls in love with a woman he gets to know through an interpreter. In Lydia Davis’s “French Lesson I: Le Meurtre,” what begins as a lesson in beginner’s French takes a sinister turn. In the essay “On Translating and Being Translated,” Primo Levi addresses the joys and difficulties awaiting the translator. Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Crossing Borders: Stories and Essays About Translation gathers together thirteen stories and five essays that explore the compromises, misunderstandings, traumas, and reconciliations we act out and embody through the art of translation. Guiding her selection is Schwartz’s marvelous eye for finding hidden gems, bringing together Levi, Davis, and Oates with the likes of Michael Scammell, Harry Mathews, Chana Bloch, and so many other fine and intriguing voices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609807924
Publisher:	Seven Stories Press
Publication date:	01/16/2018
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ is the author of twenty-four books, three short story collections, three essay collections, two books of poetry, and three translations from Italian. Among them are the novels Rough Strife (nominated for a National Book Award) and Leaving Brooklyn (nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction), and the memoirs Ruined by Reading and Not Now, Voyager. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA in fiction and translation, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. She teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and has taught in many other places both in the US and abroad. Schwartz lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Introduction 7

"Auslander" Michelle Herman 15

"The Translation" Joyce Carol Oates 51

"Crossing the Border"* Chana Bloch 77

"The Wizard of Khao-I-Dang" Sharon May 105

"The Difficulty of Translation" Lucy Ferriss 125

"On Translating and Being Translated,"* translated Zaia Alexander Primo Levi 141

"Sima Street," Bogdan Rakic Sverlana Velmar-Jancovic 147

"French Lesson I: Le Meurtre" Lydia Davis 157

"The Servile Path"* Michael Scammell 165

"The Task of This Translator" Todd Hasak-Lowy 187

"Asylum" Susan Daitch 215

"Translation and the Oulipo"* Harry Mathews 233

"The Translator" Norman Lavers 245

"The Perfect Word" Robin Hemlely 255

"In Love with Russian"* Laura Esther Wolfson 271

"The Translaor" Courtney Angela Brkic 281

"The Interrogation of the Prisoner Bung by Mister Hawkins and Sergeant Tree" David Huddle 295

"Her Native Tongue" Lynne Sharon Schwartz 307

Author Biographies 311

Acknowledgments 317

Editorial Reviews

"What an astonishing collection, it seemed as if I could drink it—these pieces exude such humanness, refer effortlessly to the tender place that exists in between languages, and somehow leave you with both everything and nothing to say." —Ella Frances Sanders, author of Lost in Translation

"A superb translator herself, Lynne Sharon Schwartz has a nuanced grasp of the deeper metaphysics of this transfer of energies, this crossing of psychological thresholds. Her selections are beautiful interrogations from fictional and essayistic vantages, and taken together they rejuvenate the age-old questions surrounding the translator's art." —Sven Birkerts,  author of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age

"Some of the best translation stories of our time." —Susan Bernofsky

"By turns humorous, grave, chilling, and caustic, the stories and essays gathered in this volume reveal all the splendors and all the miseries of the translator's task. Some of the most distinguished translators and writers of our times offer reflections that deepen our understanding of the delicate and sometimes dangerous balancing act that translators must perform. Translators are often inconspicuous or unnoticed; here we have a chance to peer into the realities and the fantasies of those who live in two languages, and the result is altogether thrilling and instructive." —Peter Connor, director of the Center for Translation Studies, Barnard College

"When readers mistrust translation, they often do so because of this lack of isometry between languages, a disconnect that gives many of the texts within Crossing Borders: Stories and Essays about Translation their narrative impetus. Every attempt to translate well is compounded not only by endless asymmetries but also by distractions, by quarrels, by mundane realities. . . .  [T]hese are stories of encounters and relationships occasioned by the need to bring together different spheres of existence. No matter that the gaps revealed in translation may sometimes—as in Lydia Davis’s story—cache outright murders, translation turns out to be less alchemy and more adhesive, taking languages or peoples or individual texts that had been separate and binding them together." —World Literature Today

From the Publisher