Reading Response + Ásta Fanney's and Vala Thorrods' Lecture (03/19)- Marina

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Ásta and Vala in the Friday lecture. Ásta is one of those magical beings, and her poetry sounds like how fairies would speak. As soon as I was able, I bought her collection of poems, and I can’t wait to read them. Vala, on the other hand, gave me a lot to think about when it comes to translating, editing, and publishing poetry. She was so knowledgeable, and I appreciated her honesty. What I take from the lecture is that as translators, we must learn to let the poems or texts be. As Vala said, sometimes we tend to want “to skin the text, to pull it apart, and murder it” and try to understand everything that's happening in the original source, but we rarely stop to think and accept that there will be some things that we just can’t see or make sense of and that’s OK, we can just let them be. With Vala and Ásta, I also learned that, although very sad, sometimes in translation, we just have to make peace with the choices we’ve made and not be frustrated with what could have been but think instead of how to best translate the work we have in front of us. 

On the other hand, I think Julia Sanches’ translations of Andrea Abreu's Dogs of Summer and Claudia Hernandéz’s Slash and Burn are overall good enough, but there are some choices that I don't understand or agree with, like the second sentence of Slash and Burn, where instead of translating “the capital of France” the translator chooses “the capital of a very old country.” It may sound more poetic, but the change wasn't necessary; it doesn't add any value to the reader's experience. She also skipped some parts of t Hernandéz’s Slash and Burn, maybe because she didn't want to pass the readers the stereotyped roles of men and women portrayed in the source text, or maybe she thought of the information as useless. Be it the way it was, I agree with Lydia Davis' "Loaf or Hot-Water Bottle" rules, where she strongly disapproves of translators deleting parts of the source texts. I think translators should be as faithful to the text as possible and not delete or add elements if uncalled for, especially large chunks of text.