She continues: “The variations in vocabulary and accent between, and within, Iberian and American Spanish don’t necessarily have much to do with the styles of the authors who write in them, though sometimes, of course, they do. ![]() “There are many, many different Spanishes,” the translator says, *#8220 just as there are lots of different Englishes.” Translating works from different lands that ostensibly have a common tongue presents an interesting challenge for someone in McLean’s line of work. The authors themselves hail from a range of countries including Spain, Cuba, Argentina and Mexico. When McLean first moved to England in 1996, she saw an ad for a master’s program in “The Theory and Practice of Literary Translation.” Since earning her MA, she’s translated works by Javier Cercas, Ignacio Padilla, Carmen MartÌn Gaite and Paula Varsavsky. A few months after the Sandinistas lost the elections, I came to England for a while, and used to go to Spain when my visas ran out to teach English, improve my Spanish, and get some circulation back in my toes.” “I just went traveling and spent a few months in Mexico and ended up staying in northern Guatemala for half a year, and then a bit longer than that in Nicaragua. ![]() “I didn’t really have a plan,” McLean says. She was politically involved at the time, and had traveled to Guatemala to see the revolution first-hand. McLean translates works mostly from South America and Spain, but Spanish is actually her fourth language, and she didn’t speak a word of it until well into her 20s. I was so impressed by the novella that I wanted to get in contact with McLean to talk about the work of translation and the books of the masterful Belgian-born Argentine who is so well-known by Spanish and Latin American readers, but virtually invisible to English-speaking ones. Archipelago recently released the first English translation, by Anne McLean, of The Diary of Andres Fava. Recently I noticed just how much I was missing out on when I saw how many works by Julio Cortázar (1914 ȸ4), one of my favorite writers, have not been translated into English. I may know enough Spanish to get me around Spain on vacation without looking like a total idiot, but I’m lucky if I can count to ten in Russian anymore without throwing in a few Gaelic numerals. I learned Spanish in high school, Gaelic in college, Russian in my free time, and I’m now just beginning to dabble in French. I have something of an ADD problem with languages, and have never gained fluency in any beyond English. ![]() My greatest failure as a reader is my inability to read literature in a second language.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |