Peter Constantine and -- Gisele

     Peter Constantine was very informative while at the same time personal, especially when he would pose questions to the audience and open the floor to engage in discussion.  I hadn't realized how sensitive we are as readers to even the slightest shift in colloquialisms until I was looking at three different translations of a single simple phrase. He seemed somewhat obsessed with dialogue, as if it were the most important thing for him in his translations, which is why I found it interesting when he mentioned translating dialogue incidentally also requires him to make some fidelity sacrifices for the sake of "naturalness." I think this is a valid point, stiff word-for-word dialogue probably wouldn't convey the writer's original meaning as well as dialogue that's been chewed on for a while until the texture is just right in your mouth.  Something else I admired was how comfortable he was with failure. When he mentioned a translator should "be fearful and timid," I honestly felt quite validated—while translation is a lot of fun, it comes with a great deal of responsibility which can be intimidating. Hearing from Constantine that mistakes are inevitable was an unexpected, yet appreciated, comfort. 

    While reading Carlos Rojas' introduction I found myself wanting to read the fictional book "Kristmas," though, truthfully, I'm not sure if that would be possible for me. As for "The Disappearance of M" itself, though it was very interesting—I especially liked the conference scenes where real writers are speaking over each other and jumping from their chairs—I thought certain words were a bit like attempts to utilize SAT vocabulary in an otherwise ordinary essay. For example, on page 5 he writes, "the poets, meanwhile, were rather nonplussed by the fact that they were not considered to be realistic "possibilities." At the bottom of page 9 he writes, "he didn't deign to try and ingratiate himself with those immature American critics and that peculiar institution of the Nobel Prize." Though those could be an attempt to make a mockery of Li Yongping's arrogance. Another thing that interrupted my reading was on page 2 when he writes that the protagonist "dimly saw that on the floor there was a box of matches."  Can one see dimly? I also thought Bird Egg's dialogue was unnatural, although maybe he was written that way in the original. I just couldn't imagine a child saying, "Who are you, and why have your come here?" or "That's my sister you're ogling at" (page 12). Lastly, and this very well could be just me, I found the first paragraph describing the bridge a bit difficult to visualize. However, these are all very specific things that didn't really take away from the quality of the reading as a whole.