Lize Spit
New in translation! The Melting by Lize Spit
My translation of Lize Spit's bestselling debut novel The Melting (Het smelt) is now out in the UK with Picador Books with a Translator's Note by yours truly. The US edition will follow soon!Meer lezen
Residency at the Vertalershuis Amsterdam
As a translator, you constantly have to make decisions on what to do about these little things. Do you just translate them as they are and preserve the Belgian-ness of the book? Or do you convert them into something more familiar for your target readership? If you translate "hostie" to "satellite wafer", are you then obliged to explain that it is a sort of puffy sugary disk with candy beads rattling inside? Would Americans appreciate encountering a "Rubbermaid" in a book they chose specifically for its foreign-ness?...Meer lezen
Translating The Chronicles
Other than translating, the best part about the festival for me was spending time with the authors and other translators. Meeting young writers who have been so successful, talking about their process, all of the risks they take, discovering that they too have a "little dictator" marching around in their head (see Blog 4) - it made the whole literary world feel within reach. We translators also got to involve them in what we do, discussing the challenges we face in not just translating, but actually re-writing their texts.Meer lezen
