Ásta is definitely one of the most interesting presenters we have had so far. She was very open about how instinctual her process is, and how dependent on the environment she is working in. She surprised me when she said "This fan is so with us in this poetic moment". It goes to show how she really does think of the page as a kind of "graveyard" -- she really experiences her own poetry through multiple senses at once. It really must be difficult to set things down in words when the totality of the experience can rest on so many uncontrollable factors.
I was happy that her cover design stayed the same in English and Icelandic. I have seen so many bad or misleading covers of translations, that I was happy she didn't have to go through that.
This week's readings were also very enjoyable. The author clearly knows when a long sentence is needed, as in
"She knows it’s the capital of a very old country because it was a question on a test in her early days of school and she had to ask a classmate for the answer, even though she was scared the teacher would catch her and take away her test paper, send her out of the classroom to see the principal, then call her mother to let her know what her daughter had been doing instead of reading over her notes every day like they’d told her to at the start of the year".
This is great characterization, and good on the translator for not "fixing" it. (We discussed this kind of problem in Dr. Waters' class last semester, so it's good to see it in practice.)
Had anyone else encountered the word "minky" before this class? It was new to me; so new that it doesn't have any connotations in my mind. Translating profanity must be somewhat like translating dialect, because of how localized and charged it is. That is to say, translating all kinds of vulgarity is hard.
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