The Festival Five with Author and Translator David Bellos, by The Editors of WLT

Interviews Get to know the participants of the upcoming 2020 Neustadt Festival in this series of short interviews. First up: David Bellos! David Bellos is a professor of French and comparative literature as well as director of the Program in Translation & Intercultural Communication at Princeton University. Educated at Oxford, he has written biographies of Georges Perec and Jacques Tati that have been translated into many languages, and an introduction to translation studies, Is That A Fish in Your Ear? He has translated numerous authors from French (Perec, Vargas, Kadare, Simenon, Antelme, Fournel) and offers a new understanding of the extraordinary life and work of Romain Gary in Romain Gary: A Tall Story. His latest book is a study of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece, Les Misérables. He will participate in three events at the festival: A Panel on Literary Translation, Why Should We Read Ismail Kadare?, and he will read Kadare’s acceptance speech during the Neustadt Prize Award ceremony. Q: In your book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, you write about the commercial considerations driving retranslations and the perils of retranslating. Is there a classic you would be willing to retranslate? A: Well, I did retranslate one book: Georges Simenon’s Pietr the Latvian (1931), the first of the detective novelettes to feature Inspector Maigret. But I treated it as a new translation; I’ve not looked at the version that was done in the 1930s... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'

[ World Literature Today | 2020-08-25 20:30:39 UTC ]
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