La criatura apareció cuando murió su padre y ella se quedó huérfana por segunda vez. En realidad, él había muerto muchas veces antes, cada vez que desaparecía. No recordaba cuántas. Su memoria era un contable falible, llevaba las cuentas como quería, y tenía tendencia a redondear por lo alto cuando se trataba de ausencias.
As with artists, it’s only natural for fruit engineers to experience arid periods of inspiration. Kwodvide, one of the senior fruit engineers in the Bio-Corporation, managed to design something to solve this problem: an inspirational cherry which he named visiocherry.
LUMRAH SAJA APABILA SEORANG insinyur rekayasa buah mengalami masa-masa gersang inspirasi layaknya seorang seniman. Kwodvide, salah satu insinyur rekayasa buah senior pernah merancang sesuatu untuk memecahkan masalah ini: satu buah-buahan yang dinamainya visiceri, alias ceri inspirasi.
The creature appeared when her father died and she was orphaned for the second time. In fact, he had died several times before, every time he disappeared. She could not remember how many times. Her memory was fallible: it kept count as it wanted to and had a tendency to round up when it came to absences.
As someone who thinks of myself primarily as a writer, I first became interested in translation three years ago when I started working on a novel inspired by the tropes of wuxia (martial arts fantasy) fiction in English.
We're delighted to welcome John Yu Branscum and Yi Izzy Yu to the blog, to tell us more about their translation of Ji Yun, and their work on Chinese anomaly tales, or zhiguai. You can read their translation of Ji Yun's Guests from the Sky in the September 2019 issue of Samovar, alongside the original Chinese. They are both writers and translators, and teach at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. They are one of two finalists for the The International Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts from Antioch University/Lunch Ticket Magazine.
Umberto Eco once pessimistically said that “translation is the art of failure”. In contrast, I say that this precious craft is the art of success because without literary translation, we are all separate dots in an ocean of failures.
Short stories tend to have much shorter lifespans than novels do. As such, a translation is a form of reincarnation. The end result is the same story, but also a completely different one at the same time. The first level of changes is due to the different language operating under another structure, a different set of ties binding the abstract with the specific. But there's also the second level, a more intimate level where the story surreptitiously obtains new properties after it’s been processed through the mind of the translator.
I got into translation for the same reason many people get into blogging, writing reviews, and other fannish activities: I loved certain stories and felt the strong desire to share them with my friends. Except many of my genre-reading friends do not speak Russian. And while I'm not a reviewer and am a lazy blogger at best, in this case I had, ahem, a particular set of skills…
