Megan McDowell Reflection Post

I got a lot out of last Friday's lecture given by Megan McDowell. I was surprised, in all honesty, because I wasn't sure how a lecture on Spanish to English translation could be relevant to translating Japanese. However, McDowell spent time addressing difficulties and concerns applicable to all translators, which I found very helpful. One of my questions as a student translator has been how to begin getting involved in real world translation projects. McDowell, who somehow managed to achieve a full time career as a translator, went into great detail on the steps she took to become the translator she is today. Working for smaller presses seemed to be important to allowing her to break into the world of translation, which inspired me to do some research on my own after the lecture to look into smaller publishing firms which handle Japanese to English translations. I was also inspired by her close relationships with the authors she is translating; working with living authors may not be as difficult as I initially believed! 

Another thing that struck me was her analysis of how much time truly goes into translating a novel. When I am working on translation projects, I often ask myself if I am moving too slowly, or if I am doing something wrong which is eating up more time than necessary. Based on McDowell's analysis of how much time she spends drafting, editing, and editing some more, I am now much more satisfied with my own abilities as a translator in terms of how much time it takes me to work through a full page of text. 

One more thing really stuck with me: McDowell described a specific case in one of her translations which relied on wordplay. In order to circumvent this problem when translating the joke into English, she chose to translate the original text using words which were not present at all in the original. She created her own joke in English which relied on rhyme in order to achieve the same effect as the original. Learning about how she justified translating a Spanish sentence into an English sentence with a very different literal meaning was illuminating to me. Though I've heard about these sorts of decisions before, when she explained it, it sort of just stuck. I was pleasantly surprised that I learned a lot from her lecture, as her content was geared towards all translators: not just Spanish to English! 


Alexa Drescher

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yasmine Seale

 Armaan Arif 04/07/2024 Professor Vincent Yasmine Seale presented the work not as a mere book, but as a living tradition of storytelling. She highlighted that the number "1001" is not just literal but symbolic, inviting endless contributions to this story. Seale discussed the challenges and innovations of translating such a classic. She plans to employ long, flowing sentences that span the course of a night, mimicking the storytelling technique of Shahrazad, who uses tales to stave off her fate until dawn. This choice aims to capture the original's poetic flair and emotional depth. Moreover, Seale intends to incorporate various manuscripts in her translation to reflect the historical depth and varied interpretations of The Nights . This method contrasts with traditional translations that typically cite a single source, aiming to portray the text as an evolving entity rather than a fixed work. Yasmine Seale’s lecture was a great portrayal of her translating style and ...
Read more

Yasmine Seale's lecture

 As part of the MFA in literary translation, this semester we are taking a class titled: "A Thousand and One Nights: A Translator's Playground" where we have learned the rich and complicated history surrounding the translation of The Nights . In this context, to have had the opportunity to listen to Yasmine Seale, the newest translator of this work,  was absolutely wonderful. One of the things she mentioned which I really liked was that The Nights  resists being called "a book" as it's more a tradition of storytelling.  This is very fitting since, as we have learned in this class, The Nights  is a compendium of stories that grew throughout time until eventually reaching 1001. Seale mentioned that she might be interested in adding her own stories to this ever-growing tradition since the number 1001 is less of a concrete number and more of an invitation to infinity. I also found it very interesting how the lack of a clear original or an author has provided dif...
Read more

Report on Megan McDowell

  Megan McDowell’s “FAQs: Highly Subjective Answers to All Your Questions about Latin American Contemporary Translation” Lia Galván Megan McDowell – a translator from Latin American literature into English – gave a lecture on Friday, February 2nd, 2024 as part of Boston University’s Literary Translation Series. She was introduced by the series curator Professor Keith Vincent who mentioned her impressive resume. McDowell’s translations have been featured in magazines such as The New Yorker and have won several prizes such as t he National Book Award for Translated Literature, the English PEN award, and the Premio Valle-Inclán. In her lecture, “FAQs: Highly Subjective Answers to All Your Questions about Latin American Contemporary Translation” McDowell discussed the questions she has been asked the most during her translation journey and shared her ongoing reflections about the most appropriate way to answer them.  The first question that McDowell addressed was “How long does it...
Read more