{"id":275096,"date":"2009-11-20T18:17:57","date_gmt":"2009-11-20T18:17:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/11\/20\/aira-on-translation\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:15:16","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:15:16","slug":"aira-on-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/11\/20\/aira-on-translation\/","title":{"rendered":"Aira on Translation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seems ironically fitting to follow the first Making the Translator Visible<\/a> post with this bit from Conversational Reading<\/a> about a recent interview with Cesar Aira (whose Ghosts<\/em> is—to steal a line from a New York Times<\/em> article—so good it’s in need of adjectives yet invented that would be written in italics and all caps) in Letras Libres<\/em><\/a> and Aira’s feeling about translators:<\/p>\n

\n

A una correcci\u00f3n sobre todo. Pero yo siempre a la traducci\u00f3n la tom\u00e9 como un oficio del que viv\u00ed. Ah\u00ed s\u00ed lo vi con todo pragmatismo, hasta tal punto que me especialic\u00e9 en literatura mala. Porque los editores pagan lo mismo por la mala que por la buena, y la buena es mucho m\u00e1s dif\u00edcil de traducir. Entonces termin\u00e9 especializ\u00e1ndome, bah, m\u00e1s bien tomando estos bestsellers norteamericanos, que son facil\u00edsimos de traducir porque est\u00e1n escritos en una prosa estereotipada.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Essentially: any pragmatic translator would prefer to translate bestsellers, because they sell more and the prose is so bad that they’re much easier to translate.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Here’s to hoping literary translators always remain quirky and as unpragmatic as wealthy independent publishers. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seems ironically fitting to follow the first Making the Translator Visible post with this bit from Conversational Reading about a recent interview with Cesar Aira (whose Ghosts is—to steal a line from a New York Times article—so good it’s in need of adjectives yet invented that would be written in italics and all caps) in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[866,426,28606,6746],"class_list":["post-275096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cesar-aira","tag-conversational-reading","tag-ghosts","tag-translators"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275096"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":350226,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275096\/revisions\/350226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}