Lost and Found in Translation: Storytelling and the Untranslatable, by Michał Rusinek

Essay Photo by Eileen Pan / Unsplash “Instead of a totalizing interpretation,” writes the author, translators should seek a dialogical one. “We have to leave space,” he writes, “for a story, an anecdote, a metaphorical footnote.” We all spend a lot of time at airports. After having some coffee and browsing in shops that used to be duty-free, I always like to sit somewhere near a “Lost and Found” office. It is usually a quiet place. There is no one in, or there is someone bored, yawning. If you happen to lose your luggage and decide to report it to this person, he or she would look up and you would soon realize that there is no big difference between a “bored” and a “consoling” look. Anyway, I am sure that underneath these bored or sad looks there is something more. There are stories, tragedies, comedies, dialogues, misunderstandings. There is literature there. So, I would like you to treat this “Lost and Found” office as a key metaphor of this article. Two years ago I translated a picture book for children by Oliver Jeffers, called Lost and Found (HarperCollins, 2010). It is a story about friendship. There is a little boy who finds a penguin at his door. He assumes that the wordless penguin is lost. When he discovers that penguins come from the South Pole, he takes him there in a rowboat. He helps the penguin ashore and casts off. On his way back the boy realizes his mistake: he had considered the penguin lost, but he was... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'

[ World Literature Today | 2021-10-20 18:36:14 UTC ]
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