Elliott Colla Quotes About Translations

• Take Ezra Pound's translations of poetry from Chinese. He doesn't really know Chinese, and the very strange results that he comes up with aren't all successful, but as a whole it's incredibly successful, moving us away from familiar forms and indicating other forms we might think in or express in.

  Elliott Colla

  Movimiento, Éxito, Pensamiento

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

• En los estudios de traducción hablamos de domesticación -estilos de traducción que hacen algo familiar- o de extrañamiento -estilos de traducción que hacen algo radicalmente diferente-. Yo utilizo mucho ambos en mi traducción, y el modernismo hace ambas cosas. Por ejemplo, si nos fijamos en la forma en que James Joyce presenta el Ulises, ¿se trata de domesticar un clásico? Piense en ello como un experimento en relación con un texto conocido en otro idioma.

  Elliott Colla

  Thinking, Style, Different

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

• In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing. You have to attempt what they did in that language - say, in Arabic - and try to accomplish a version of that in English, and you're constantly serving two masters.

  Elliott Colla

  Two, Trying, Doing You

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

• I think if I'd gone to an MFA program and learned that, it would have been money well spent. But translation has been that for me.

  Elliott Colla

  Thinking, Gone, Program

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

• Translation is harder, believe it or not. You do have to come up with a story, and actually I'm mystified by that process. I don't exactly know how the story just comes, but it does. But in writing a story that you're inventing, versus writing a story that somebody else has made up - there's a world of difference. In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing.

  Elliott Colla

  Believe, Writing, World

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

• I wrote Baghdad Central right after translating a great work by Ibrahim al-Koni, who is sort of a master of Arab fiction. In conversations with him I realized that translations have been my MFA program. If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English. That's how I've figured it out.

  Elliott Colla

  Writing, Program, Great Work

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

• With Ibrahim al-Koni, what I figured out was - and you'll see this in his novels - if your time is limited, make the unit of the chapters small so that you can finish one a day, at least in the first draft. Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft. I think if I'd gone to an MFA program and learned that, it would have been money well spent. But translation has been that for me.

  Elliott Colla

  Thinking, Program, Novel

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com