Happy Friday, Asymptote readers! This week’s a doozy. It’s Women’s History Month in the United States, and to celebrate, here’s an article on translating women from the Middle East—why does it matter? (Do we even need to ask?). Sort of related: seven badass women you didn’t learn about in history class, including my favorites, Maria Sibylla Merian and Yaa Asentewaa.
Happy week for writers and translators: the PEN awards were announced, and this year’s translation-friendly grantees include Asymptote alum Sawako Nakasayu, for the translation of Japanese poet Chika Sagawa’s Collected Poems (check out a snippet in our archives) as well as blog friend Katrina Dodson, for her translation of Brazilian writer/enigma Clarice Lispector (read our exclusive interview with Dodson here).
Cup runneth over: two new translations of the Iliad are out this month (or in the works), and both of them hail from folks at Davidson College. Russian great dramatist Anton Chekhov might be spinning in his grave: here’s a new translation of Uncle Vanya. And hyper-serious, super-heady American poet John Ashbery gets his readership thinking about French ingenue Rimbaud. And speaking of popular translations: here’s how Karl Ove Knausgaard and Elena Ferrante’s hyper-real fictions won us over.
You don’t need to tell us twice: universal, computerized translations might be “getting better and better,” but cultural sensitivity can’t be taught (leading, inevitably, to “sex and misunderstanding”). Here’s why our translators need to be alive in the world.
In case you missed it (and, for the sake of your sanity, we sort of hope you did): here’s what Donald Drumpf’s family surname might mean (how apt—but is it true?).