Foreignizing translation

 This would seem to result from two processes. 

If I translate grammatical structures literally, then the translation will seem foreign or unfamiliar. 

An example is if we decided to translate a reflexive verb as a reflexive in English, even if the reflexive is not used that way.  We could say "Spanish speaks itself here' to say "se habla español."  I would argue that this has nothing to do with the foreignness of Spanish, but with a simple grammatical difference in the way a language divides up its tasks and functions. There is an example from John McWhorter's critique of a translation from the Russian, where the translators use reflexive in English simply because the Russian is reflexive, but it is a simply translation error, in McWhorter's view: 

"Russian, like many European languages, often uses self in ways that don’t make literal sense. English only does this a bit: in behave yourself, you might ask just who else you would exert this behaving upon if not yourself. Perjure yourself and repeat yourself are similar. Russian fairly drips with verbs like these, though – you don’t get angry, you anger yourself; you don’t smile – you smile yourself, and so on."

Often Spanish acts that way. We might say "levántate" means "stand up," not "stand yourself up." We use the reflexive to say we eat or drink all of something.  "He ate up all the cake." "Se la comió entera." We use a preposition instead of a reflexive for this: eating something up rather than "eating myself it." Falling asleep is dormirse, rather than simply sleeping (dormir.) We don't literally "sleep ourselves." Sometimes the reflexive is just there to make a verb intransitive, or just makes no difference at all, like the difference between morir and morirse. The only real difference is that we tend to say "me muero" when we are speaking hyperbolically: "me muero de aburrimiento." "I'm dying of boredom." We wouldn't say "muero de aburrimiento."  

A second way of being "foreign" is by using different registers of the target language. But here an odd thing happens. The foreign elements have nothing to do with the source language at all. Like when a Victorian British translator tries to make Homer sound like Medieval English, because Homer is "old" in a similar way. Here the analogy is forced. 

A third way might be from the use of loan words. We can keep a word in Spanish rather than translating it.  "Hey, compadre, let's get going." That's fine, but it doesn't take us very far. 

In short, I don't really believe that "foreignizing" translation ought to be a thing enjoying a huge privilege over supposedly "domesticating" modes. 

Wooden

 "We should instead examine the cultural and social conditions of the translation, considering whether its interpretants initiate an event, creating new knowledges and values by supplying a lack that they indicate in those that are currently dominant in the receiving situation. The lack may be an interpretant that a poet’s version can or cannot supply, for instance, a concept of equivalence that involves a semantic correspondence or even close adherence to the source text. The most authoritative and widely circulated translations may themselves not apply such an interpretant, or, if they do, a new edition of the source text or a new, independently articulated interpretation of it may require that the concept of equivalence applied in previous translations be revised in a retranslation (cf. chapter 5). Nonetheless, no interpretant can be regarded as inherently valuable, apart from its situation in a specific culture at a specific historical moment."

Venuti, Lawrence. Translation Changes Everything : Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ku/detail.action?docID=1101392.
Created from ku on 2025-08-25 21:11:33.

 

What is it about this writing style?  It aims to be careful in definitions, but it ends up being confusing and a bit wooden. I guess what he's saying is that a translation should alter the target language / culture by supplying something previously missing. The one example he supplies is confusing, since "semantic correspondence" is the definition of translation itself. 

The style can alert the reader that something is amiss in the thinking itself. Why be so ponderous if your point is actually a valid one? 

Vocabulary peaks

Vocabulary can peak in one's 40s or even 70s. There are different studies. I've found recently that words are coming more quickly to my brain as I write. It has to be le mot juste. I was just thinking about how I was complaining about someone's effort to complete a Lorca play, and I used the word confection,   "an elaborately constructed thing, especially a frivolous one." I don't know if I could have come up with that 20 years ago.  

I also think about my critique of Venuti. I can use words like querulous, plaintive, and lachrymose to describe his tone. His book has been cited 19,000 times, according to Google Scholar, but he can still present his field as marginalized and stigmatized.  

Adjectives are wonderful and spicy. You can have a petulant dogmatism, for example. The prejudice against adjectives is rather silly. Their use doesn't produce wordiness. Wordiness, rather, results from a lack of discipline in constructing well formed sentences and paragraphs.  

Hanzi

 There are about 77 characters introduced in the first 7 lessons, so if that pace is valid there will be 770 in the 70 lessons. Basic adult literacy is 3.000, I'm told. I've studied for 11 days and one 7 lessons, but am slowing down on purpose. I review what I've learned for at least a day, and don't finish a lesson in one day. 

Sometimes when I am reading I just look at the meaning of the character and don't vocalize the Chinese word. This is a bad habit. 

Syntax

  I haven't noticed anything difficult about Chinese grammar yet. I've yet to make a word order mistake.

Subject verb object.  

Subject adverb (not / often ) / verb object. 

Possessor / possessive particle / thing possessed 

Adjective or adjectival noun / noun 

My son does not eat Korean food. 

You would have the word for I, then the particle de, then the word for son, a negating particle bu, then the verb, and then Korea food.  Nouns can modify other nouns like "music class," the way we do in English. 

We have a word and the works like English and, connecting two things.  It made me wonder whether all languages have and.  

Nouns don't inflect for case or number. Verbs do not conjugate.  I'm guessing there will be a particle before the verb to indicate a time marker. 

I wrote this poem in my head in bed before I got up; entirely fictional and maybe the worst poem I've ever written

Here in the suburbs

where the meaninglessness of life

becomes more evident 

with every sit com we watch

every police procedural

I fell in love

with my daughter's middle school teacher

(It was ok

we were both divorced

and my daughter didn't go

to that school any more)

We met by chance

at a Starbucks

She was overweight  but attractive

So was I 

We exchanged numbers

By the third date

we were watching tv

Her kisses were like honey

She liked Law & Order

Special Victims Unit

But why call the police

into people's sex lives?

I thought to myself

Sure, leave the minors alone

But between consenting adults

most things are ok

We had to break up eventually 

I didn't like her shows

I preferred other forms of banality 

The Dream

 I had to drive my dad to his new job. It turned out to be in some kind of warehouse, not really set up for a desk job, and there was woman there yelling at us, at me particularly.  My dad was vague about what the job actually was supposed to be, something related to academic administration (my dad's actual profession.)  

My dad looked about 40, and I was the age I am now (64).  The dream went on for a long time, and then I had to realize that it was, in fact, a dream, and that my dad had been dead for 24 years.  I began to accuse him of being dead, as I usually do in these dreams, which I've been having for 24 fucking years. I used as evidence the fact that I looked older than he did. 

I am nearing the age my dad was when he died, a day before he turned 65, May 14 2000. That will happen in 10 days for me.  Turning 65, hopefully not dying.  

Anti jokes

 Why did the chicken cross the road?

That light as green.

How many Germans does it take to change a lightbulb?

One.  

Other hobbies I don't have

 I forgot to mention blogging. Once again, that is a habit engrained in everyday life and in my work, so I don't consider it a hobby, but maybe it is. 

I don't have watching sports as a main hobby. I will watch, if something happens to be on, but I don't follow sports very much. I used to follow tennis. We've (my friend and I) lost some of our interest in KU sports. A guy just gave the athletic dept. 300 million, which would pay for 3,000 professors. I object, in principle, to having any interest now in sports at my university. 

Novel reading is a hobby I used to have but don't.  I will read a novel if there is a reason to, but I find working myself through a middle brow novel kind of a torture. When I do read a novel, I sometimes develop my intelligence and knowledge in wonderful ways. I tend to need to read novels in languages I don't know completely, so that I can exercise my brain in other ways, by trying to figure out what is happening. When I read Japanese novels in Catalan, though, I understand too much, so the process gets tiresome. It takes more words to say "he nodded" in Catalan: "va fer si amp el cap." Try reading that phrase hundreds of times in a long novel. 

Other hobbies

Listening to music counts as a hobby.  I have quite an extensive knowledge. 

Also, crosswords and word games. I didn't think of that because it is just so much of a regular part of the routine. 

Traveling? Not much.  I will do it, but it is not one of my main interests. 

 Memorizing poetry. I didn't think of it first because it is tied up with my work.

Also, writing poetry and short fiction.  

A poem by Gluck

 

My hobbies

 My hobbies are great.  Having them all at once doesn't work, not because of time, but because of the way attentiveness is structured. 

*Language learning. That is a great hobby. I am learning some Chinese. You can't learn all the languages at once. I am most drawn to Chinese and Ancient Greek, right now. They are the great classical languages. I can read in most romance languages, like Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese. 

*Bird watching. I saw most of the birds that live near where I do, so I came to an impasse. I have to take a trip to see a lot of other birds that I wouldn't see around here.  

*Song-writing. Piano playing.  I learned to write songs.  I don't have to write 100 more songs.  I can improvise on the piano, but I don't improve in improv. 

*Choral Singing. I continue to do this. I am in a choir at my place of work. This is great because there are other people involved. 

*Running. I haven't done that in a while... 

*Reading. That's not really my hobby, but my profession. I have PhD in Comp Lit. Yet I don't tend to read novels. 

*Cooking. Yes, I'm into that recently, mostly because of another of my hobbies, eating.  

I don't see watching tv or listening to music as hobbies. That is just part of the texture of everyday life. 

More jokes

 I went out on a blind date the other day. I didn't know what she looked like, but I recognized her by her guide dog. It could have worked out for us, because, frankly, I'm not that good looking. But she wasn't seeing it.  

Sometimes

 Sometimes I think Venuti just thinks that invisible, self-effacing translation is bad, and visible, self-conscious calling attention to itself translation is good. He can seem that simplistic. 

80 footnotes

 In Conejero's El sueño de la vida, two acts of almost 40 pages (pages 99-137) , there are 80 footnotes by the editor, most of which identify the source material from which the playwright took his own play. In other words, this is largely a pastiche of Lorca's work. Not all the 80 footnotes do this, but most of them do, and some of the source material occupies a whole page of the text or more, or most of a page. 

I won't call it plagiarism. It is pastiche: pasting together texts. 

Literally, a character will stand up and recite a Lorca poem. Or the "author" figure will speak the contents of a Lorca interview, verbatim. The material is authentic, then!  But it is stitched together. In no way does this complete Lorca's text.  

Double vision

 It is curious.  Now having studied Chinese for of 9 days, I can see the characters in two ways. As meaningless syllables (as most are to me) or as words I know (as a few, very few are).  In a string of words I happen to know, I can read Chinese! In a string of words I don't know, I am looking at arbitrary symbols. 

Now, it takes effort to read, so a sentence that seems wholly unfamiliar, might be one that I can read if I simply stare at it long enough. So there is an intermediate level of difficulty. 

I haven't said why I want Chinese. I want to be unafraid of it, in the first place; unintimidated. It is conquering a fear (not real fear, like something will harm me, but a fear of failure). I want to get around to the T'ang Dynasty stuff eventually, after doing modern Chinese a while. 

Duolingo is perfectly fine for getting a start here. There are 70 lessons. Divided into three sections (10, 30, and 30). Each lesson has several parts, and to do one part, you must do 15 things, some very easy, some not so much. 

I ordered a Chinese character book, and now I realize that it is part one out of 10, with only 50 characters. It will cost 90 dollars to complete the set.  

Taste as self-defense

 What I mean is this. If we don't have taste, then we cannot call something cringe-worthy. Something is calling to me in need of being condemned, and I need to listen to that.  Take this translation of Venuti's from a translation from the Catalan. If it were an original poem in English, I would criticize certain lines:

"with everything halted in midcourse" = boring language / how is that a line of poetry? 

"gradation of solitudes / lifts its face" = pretentious / difficult to visualize. Mushy writing.  

"the solitude that wafts" = "lyrical" [cringe]

"the kind that costs dearly / to reach" = infelicitous  

"to escape from urban loneliness" = just, no.  It's too obvious. Also, is loneliness and solitude the same word in the Catalan? I'll have to look. 

"and the kind experienced only" = prosaic, not interesting, language is not charged with meaning. These are supposed to be different kinds of solitudes, in gradations, but they blurring together in my mind. 

Overall: too many relative clauses. Too many enjambments where the part after the line break is less interesting, like "a gradation of solitudes / lifts its face." "the kind that costs dearly / to reach." stirring leaves / and branches." 

Now, I could look at it in Catalan, too. I don't know how much of the fault lies with the poet and how much with the translator.  Venuti complains that a poem from this project was rejected and that the editor could give no theoretically coherent reason, but taste is a good self-defense. We know something is wrong. 

    Once here,
   with everything halted in midcourse,
   a gradation of solitudes
   lifts its face: the solitude that wafts
   with the slack wind stirring leaves
   and branches and the kind that costs dearly
   to reach, the solitude of wilderness
   and the kind experienced only
   by those who grip the steering wheel
   to escape from urban loneliness
   gliding over narrow highways
   to stop where the forest is most impenetrable.

Some objections to "foreignizing" translation.

1. It is exoticizing. It mistakes the different for the exotic. 

2. The "foreign" elements are often spurious. They are introduced in the process of translation itself, rather than reflecting any true  

3. It depends on Whorfian notions of linguistic difference.  

4. It is suspect in the sense that it mistakes qualities that emerge as the product of difference, for  qualities of the original things.  

5. It seems to be Derridean, but it is not, because it fetishizes otherness rather than seeing it as difference. 

There is no foreignizing translation

Translation goes from A to B.  We think of it as directional, source and target, etc...  We call A foreign and B domestic. 

Foreign is a relational term. A is only "foreign" in relation to B, not intrinsically. In the same way, B is "foreign" in relation to A.  The "foreign" element of translation only exists as a by-product of translation itself. It is produced by the process, not by the "foreignness" of the text itself. What we call a foreignizing translation is one that domesticates in other ways. 

I think we shouldn't use "domestic" either, except in its purely denotative sense. Domestic as familiar, tame, a bit boring.  

The thesaurus gives this range of synonyms for foreign in this sense:  "unfamiliar, unknown, unheard of, strange, alien, exotic, outlandish, odd, peculiar, curious, bizarre, weird, queer, funny; novel, new." It is easy to see the problem here.  We need a term without those connotations, like "second" in "second language acquisition." Lack of familiarity is simply that.   

quaint

 Quaint and foreign are similar concepts. Quaint is the feeling one gets from something old-fashioned, with a sense of charm. Something can only be old-fashioned after the fact, not in its own original moment. It is a differential feeling, then. Foreign is also foreign to me.  It's not something that is absolute. I fear the appeals to foreigness in translation theory are ideologically charged. We shouldn't talk about foreigners, but about a second language, the same way we talk about learning a second language, not a foreign one.  

I was looking at Arnold's original criticism of Newman's Homer, and Newman's response.  Newman seems to feel that Homer is quaint from the perspective of later antiquity, say 5th century Athens. But why is that the point of comparison?  Homer wasn't quaint in his time period. Old and new are entirely relative concepts. In the year 1000, that was the latest year those people had had so far. They weren't medieval from their own perspective, right? Can you imagine them saying, "Hey, Mom, jump into the 11th century already." 

I guess with Tolkien, the quaintness is baked in. In other words, he wanted his Hobbits to seem quaint from the reader's perspective, rather than living in their own present space.  

Motivation

I admit that part of my motivation in going after Venuti is personal. I read again his review of my book the other day. I was reading Weinberger's review of Alter's version of the psalams, in LRB, and I thought how Venuti is so lacking in literary depth.  It is almost shocking.  I have this kind of incandescent rage that nobody has called him out yet.  

He seems to think there is one, evil philosophy of translation through the millennia, that he calls "instrumentalism." 

"The target of this polemic is a model of translation that I shall call instrumentalism. It conceives of translation as the reproduction or transfer of an invariant that is contained in or caused by the source text, an invariant form, meaning, or effect."

Yet, if we remove the word "invariant," we are left pretty much with a definition of translation itself. And who really believes the text to be "invariant"? He rails against the idea of "mechanical" translation, but who really believes translation to be mechanical?  

It is all straw man argument and caricature, Manichean.  He loves to contrast his own authentic, hermeneutic model, but aren't there many, intersecting models of translation? There is not a single, theoretically correct model against which the conventional idea fall short. 

 

Imperfect Pitch

 I can open up the tuner on my phone and sing a note that to me seems the most comfortable in my range and the one that is most in tune with my speaking voice. It is typically a G3, but it can be an Ab, or F#, or a little bit lower or higher. Today, for example, it is an F, a whole step below.  It is an F in several independent attempts.  I am not trying to get the G, but simply monitoring where my voice feels the most centered. 

But it kind of made me think. We have an ability to sense ranges through hour voice, but not exact pitches.  I could do the same thing and try to sing the highest note that I think is in my range. I just did that and it was a G4.  That's about right: I can't go much above that, and when the A appears in my tenor part I am not happy. That's the highest note in Handel, I think.  I could also do that with the lower part of my range. 

The Return of Seinfeld

 The only way to actually write a book is with the Seinfeld chain.  (For me at least.) The idea is "don't break the chain!" You have a chain of uninterrupted days of work on a project, weekends included, and try to keep that chain going as long as possible. The key is momentum and the snow-ball effect.  You might have a 10 day chain, or 40 day chain, or even longer. I am on day 10, and I have gotten a shit-load of work done. While longer chains are better, the key is to start a new chain right away when you have broken the previous one.    

As a young kid, Jerry Seinfeld watched tv, as kids do, but he watched it analytically, trying to figure out the principles of comedy, which jokes worked and why, etc... This is what I did with poetry as a kid; I just was trying to see how it worked, because it was mysterious to me.  

Then, as a young stand-up comic, he wrote jokes every day. When he would get up in front of an audience, he would test them out, and improve them based on audience reaction. Some jokes will work and others won't, etc... He didn't stop writing when he had enough jokes, but would refine his material syntactically and prosodically.  

I don't really care if you like Seinfeld or his brand of humor, but the work ethic is evident. 

Contra Venuti

 I decided to include a chapter called "Contra Venuti" as a kind of appendix to the "Misuderstanding Lorca" book. I found some old  blog posts that are helpful, and I found myself going on a rant in one of the chapters against Venuti.  I found that Leslie agreed with me about him, as well, from comments to a blog post 10 years ago.  

Chinese

 Chinese has two difficult aspects: the way it's written and the way it is spoken. 

The grammar seems simple, at least so far. It is SVO.  There's a little negative particle before the uninflected verb. The verb doesn't inflect. Adjective precede nouns, as in English. I've done 4 lessons in 5 days. Probably today, the 5th day, I just need to review the fourth lesson. 

I was wrong that they are introducing more characters with each lesson. The number of new ones is actually less, but it seems like more because I have not thoroughly learned the characters from previous lessons. 

Going too fast risks burnout. Going too slow is not good either. You want to spend a lot of time, but not emphasize going too fast ahead.  Reviewing things that seem easy is good; it seems easy because you know it, and that is a good thing.  But you want to get to know the characters that are repeated a lot: is, and, not. Those have to be second nature. 

A paradox

 We know that fluidity is better than rigidity, openness is better than close-mindedness, heterodoxy more than orthodoxy, tolerance is good, intolerance is bad, etc...  

But certain authors that emphasize these points to so in a Manichean way. They always seem to know exactly what the correct, heterodox position is, which is the opposite of the orthodox one (which they also know).  There is never any hesitation, no doubt.  We can predict exactly what they will say.  There is no real epistemological humility that goes along with this championing of doubt. 

The other side is always the dogmatic one, not our side.  

Mistake

 I made a mistake.  The third lesson in Chinese did not introduce more characters than the first two. It just seemed like it because of the cumulative  effect. I did three sections (out of 70!) in three days, so of course the 3rd one seemed like too much. I have to spend all of tomorrow's reviewing those 1st 3, rather than going back to the 4th.   

What do I mean by getting Lorca wrong

 A translator who introduces a lot of extraneous material, on the theory of appealing to a "domestic remainder." Who should know better, but ends up not. 

A playwright who completes an incomplete work by Lorca, a bit arrogantly. 

A book that insists on the importance of the real life analogues of Lorca's plays, as though he were not a writer of fiction. 

The assumption that Flamenco based on Lorca's poetry will be of a piece with Lorca's own engagement with flamenco.   

It ends up that I am in a conservative place,  wanting to conserve the integrity of the work and not liking theories that emphasize the freedom of the translator / adaptor. Perhaps my detractors are right?  

Misunderstanding Lorca

There are 8 chapters, each one with have 6,000 words. That gets us to 48,000 words. I should be able to finish the book in about 100 days, then, averaging about 500 a day. Let's call it four months, then, allowing for the fact that some of the book is already written, and for some flexibility.  So November is my goal.   

Another month for cleaning it up.  

 

Mandarin

 I was doing some Mandarin in Duolingo.  Don't ask why; I don't even know myself. I guess the difficulty is part of why. The sound system and the writing, put together, are massively complex, or at least foreign to me, even though the grammar itself is not particularly daunting.  

I hear that there are tones and different ones, but I wouldn't be able to tell you which ones are which. 

Anyway, the first section was all: soup, hot tea, coffee, this is coffee, this is water, this is hot water, water and porridge, hot coffee and rice.  It was super easy.  Then the next section on nationality. I am Chinese, I am American, China, Japan, Japanese.  Also super easy.  A modest number of characters to be learned. 

And then the third section, all of a sudden, is way more difficult. It is not inherently more difficult, there is just more material introduced all at once. Professions, combined with nationalities. Far more characters. Words with two characters. More listening exercises in which you have to hear each syllable.  I'm an English teacher, how about you. Etc... 

So I go back first and review the first sections, everyday. 

Some things are like this. Anyone can make a note on the piano by pushing down a key. A simple child's song with one hand is easy. But then intermediate pieces take me a long time to learn. 

Catch-22

 We are going to get a raise if we reduce the departmental budgets.  But most of the department's budget is tied up in salaries, so how can we do that? Buying fewer dry erase markers?  

Incomprensiones logocéntricas

 The guy who tried to complete Lorca's play talks about the "logocentric misundersandings" of what he had done. People objected to what I would see as the arrogance of thinking you can finish one of Lorca's unfinished plays. That's the same as translating Shakespeare into Spanish, he suggests. But it is not. 

It's the same with translation. If I complain about someone's translation, then I am the enemy of free translation. If I complain about someone completing Lorca's work, I am logocentric and against "intertextuality."  But no, my objections are serious ones. I am not against free translation or intertextuality. I am against doing those things badly.  

Soria Olmedo

 I got two short books from Spain on Lorca's theater and poetry by Andrés Soria Olmedo. He is a top Lorca guy and I agree with what he says. Each chapter is short.  It is a very basic introduction on some level, fruitfully read by those new to Lorca, but also has ideas I hadn't thought of, but with which I agree. For example, he points out the "documentary" was an avant-garde form when Lorca used that word to describe La casa de BA. 

 I rarely disagree with Andrés, Christopher Maurer, Andrew Anderson, or Melissa Dinverno.  If I do, I probably would think I am wrong! (But I do disagree with Ian Gibson a lot of the time.)

When I say "Misunderstanding Lorca," then, I think I am in the mainstream, but that there are other tendencies that persist. 

***

I had to look up the word "high-brown" and it told me it was from 1911. It gives the first known use of documentary in this sense as 1935! Soria Olmedo gives it as 1926 (I'm not sure in what language) and Bernarda Alba is 1936.  

I looked up some words from my birth year, doofus, golden oldies, cyborg, hair gel, keep-away, meet and greet, soul food, stink eye. 

Other words from '35: Phillips screwdriver, riff, roman fleuve. virology.  This just means that the word first appeared in print in a given year, as far as anyone's been able to discover. The word in most cases had to exist before it is found in print. I had no idea soul food was so recent. 

DIÁLOGO DEL AMARGO - Vídeo promocional

Here's another one that I saw in Madrid. A two page dialogue becomes a play of more than an hour. 

Leave Lorca Alone

 I"m thinking of writing a chapter called "Leave Lorca Alone" with an analysis of the effort to complete Lorca's "Comedia sin título" with a pastiche of unrelated texts.  

Miso and poached egg

 A breakfast I like is miso broth, with a poached in it. I lower the egg into it carefully, then make sure it is covered in the broth so that it poaches. You know it is down when there is white film around the yolk.  I typically don't need to put anything else in it, but I will use sesame oil if I remember.  

Ribs

 I put some boneless beef spare ribs in a snow cookers for several hours. 

Seasoning was:

Chinese five spice (very sparingly)

Miso paste

Soy sauce

Mirin

Rice vinegar 

Garlic, Ginger, onions 

I added enough water to cover the meet. Check after two hours, and then at the third hour. Then it can be turned off or to "keep warm" depending on when you want to eat. 

It was very tasty. I made a potato and black pepper dish out of Madjur Jaffrey's Indian cookbook, and some wilted spinach to go along with it. 

***

Pork or beef ribs can also be done in crock pot with traditional bbq flavors: onion, tomato sauce, vinegar, molasses, cayenne, in whatever combination desired. Or you can just pour bbq sauce with the meat in the slow cooker and do it that way.  Key elements are salt, acid, something pungent like onions or garlic. It should be tender but not dried out. Don't open the crock pot too often.  

A joke

 Pascal bets on the existence of God and writes a whole book about it, reasoning that if there is god, there is everything to gain and nothing to lose, etc... When he gets to the pearly gates, they him: "Sorry, God doesn't like gamblers." 

Informal usage

Generally, informal usage is anything the dictionary would mark as "informal." Expletives of various kinds. Slang usages, for example, "bro" or "babe" or "lordy lordy," Eye dialect like "gonna." Usage considered "substandard" (ain't, don't do nothing, thusly). The informal register is legitimate, because it simply reflects particular usages in the real world. 

In a translation, though, one thinks that informality has to be motivated. One would assume that it would reflect what the original is doing, not be added simply as a cute stylistic variation.  

The same could be said of any other stylistic variation, like the use of excessively formal language.  

Foreignness as a fetish

 It strikes me that the notion of foreignness is spurious and ideological.  Spanish and English are foreign to each other, but it is better to express that as reciprocal difference or set of differences, rather than Spanish as essentially foreign and English as our own. We talk about learning a second language, not a foreign one, because we want to avoid all those implications.  

Foreignizing translation can seem daring and edgy, domesticating translation, dull and ideologically suspect, but is this really true? All translations are oriented toward their audience and are hence domesticating.  

Some of the foreignizing strategies are mostly just distracting elements that don't really put the reader into contact with anything "foreign."  

Tape recorder

 I extended the method a bit by improvising into the tape recorder, just talking out loud for 10 minutes. I can use that tomorrow to begin writing. By "tape recorder" I mean phone, in the voice memo app. Knowing me, I won't even listen to it, but just try to remember what I said. Same difference. Knowing the recording is there is enough.  My speech is halting, not at all fluent. All the better. 

Improvisation is how we have conversations in real life. We don't script them because we don't know what the other person will say and there will always be uncertainty.  

***

I came up with this idea for an article on translation as the poet's workshop.  I'm sure others have thought of this but here it is:

Translating is the best way of becoming a poet, or working on one's poetic acumen. 

The history of translation bears this out. The history of translation is not an insistence on the translator's "invisibility," as Venuti argues.  

In the first place, there is a close reading of the original text in all its dimensions. Prosodical, semantic, aesthetic, cultural. Every word of the text is relevant, even the and and. In some sense those little function words are crucial, as Ron Padgett says.  

Secondly, there is the composition of a new text, where the poet practices writing poetry. Once again, with all the dimensions of poetic craft.  

Thirdly, there is a reflection on the relation between A and B, the reading part of translation and the writing part. 

It doesn't matter whether anyone thinks the translation is bad or good, from the perspective of this workshopping mentality.  The learning takes place no matter what because the end product is not the poem, but the poet. Seemingly bad results are more interesting. Why did they occur? If you can figure out why, then there is probably something to reflect on.  

***

Chinese poetry has highly developed prosodic rules. It is constrained worse than Mallarmé or Oulipo. Translation of Chinese poetry into English is almost free verse, and the image is supreme. Logopeia, which may or may not be present, depending on the poet, is effaced in translation itself.  So we get Charles Simic effect: no musicality, no attention to language, only the image or metaphor. 

Free verse works in two contradictory ways: it is a technical innovation, and highly crafted... or else it is simply prose broken into lines. Few readers are confident enough to reach judgment, because the translator's free verse is unlikely to be like that of Ezra Pound's, but cannot be dismissed either, because the translator might be thinking about sound, or not as the case might be. 

Contemporary readers cannot tolerate translations into metrical verse or rhyme. Yet that was standard practice for centuries. Venuti treats that as the same as free verse translation: an emphasis on fluency and transparency.  

Lends itself

 I was thinking that most reflexives in English are true reflexives, in that the object and the subject of the verb are the same, like "I dislike myself."  In Spanish, there are many uses of the reflexive grammatical construction in which the meaning itself is not reflexive at all. It can be impersonal, pseudo-passive, the reflexive that just makes a verb intransitive rather than transitive, the reflexive of consumption (eating or drinking or smoking all of something), reciprocal. 

But I found the construction "lends itself" that is not truly reflexive, but more like an impersonal intransitive construction. There are some other ones like this, "manifests itself" means show up as, not something that literally manifests itself, performing that action on itself reflexively.  

A new method

 Here is something. Open voice memos on your phone. When you are reading, find a quote you are going top use for your article or book and read it out loud, recording the quote and the page number. Then to get started working the next day listen to those voice memos and start from there. You can even do it with an idea that occurs to you. I have a voice memo from today saying "Lorca doesn't do logopoeia."  

Out of shape

 I haven't written much on my book in past months and thought I would be out of shape with prose. Nope. I write as easily an fluently as ever. My ideas are just as good. I can sit down and write for a long time without losing concentration. It is true that I warmed up a bit by blogging a lot the week before I started. 

Today I am working on a chapter on Rothenberg's Lorca translation. I argue that a language for translating Lorca already exists in the imagist movement, but that Rothenberg does not want to use that language, because.... I haven't figured that out yet!