A translator always makes choices
Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English, is as concerned with these surrounding characters as she is with Odysseus himself. Written in plain, contemporary language and released earlier this month to much fanfare, her translation lays bare some of the inequalities between characters that other translations have elided. It offers not just a new version […]
Letters to Milena: Love in Translation
“If you come to me you will be leaping into the abyss.” Kafka wrote to Milena on 13 June 1920. A warning, an ironic invitation? An attempt to seduce by repelling? For some months, between the Ottoburg boarding house in Merano, where the writer was trying to fight the course of tuberculosis, and Milena Jesenská’s […]