Martin Boyd
I recently had a discussion with another translator about the use of the English word “alien”. Those of us who grew up subjected to the cinematic expression of Ridley Scott’s terrifying imagination would probably be surprised to know that most English dictionaries do not list “a creature from another planet” as the first definition of the word “alien”. The Oxford Dictionary, for example, gives the following as the first definition of the noun form: “a foreigner, especially one who is not a naturalized citizen of the country where he or she is living”. The extraterrestrial definition of the noun comes second. Three definitions are provided for the adjective form: (1) “belonging to a foreign country”, (2) “unfamiliar and disturbing or distasteful” and, finally, (3) “supposedly from another world”. In any case, whatever the recognized uses of the word “alien” may be, I would argue that for most English speakers it invariably conjures up images of frightening lizard creatures or terrorizing mutants, and that it is therefore no longer appropriate to use the term in reference to fellow human beings.
Read more…
Martha Bátiz
My husband and I arrived in Toronto in June 2003, with our twin daughters (who were two and a half years old at the time), two dogs (a couple of adorable pugs) and one cat (a stray, picked up in a poor neighbourhood in Mexico City), after travelling in our minivan from San Antonio, Texas, where we had been living before. The journey north took us one week, but it was an enjoyable road trip as we were able to visit beautiful plantations in Tennessee and even Graceland along the way. We didn’t know anybody in Toronto, and we didn’t have work here. Our Hispanic friends in the United States and our family in Mexico called us irresponsible. How could we abandon everything we had and head off into uncertainty, with two daughters (and pets) in tow, as if it were all just a game? And in a sense it was: a kind of Russian roulette where we bet our whole lives that we’d come out unscathed; and, luckily, so far we have. More or less.
Read more…
Canada’s Minister for the Americas, Diane Ablonczy, will address executives, leaders, diplomats, journalists and entrepreneurs at the fifth annual “10 most influential Hispanic Canadians” awards, being held on Tuesday, November 15 at the Ottawa Convention Centre. Bruce Lazenby, the newly-appointed president of the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation (OCRI), will open the program. Nominations for these year’s awards were declared open in Montreal on July 7 by Member of Parliament Paulina Ayala. Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with past winners last year at his office.
Read more…
Martha Bátiz
With so many books being written and published in English, you might ask, why should we care for stories that have originally seen the light in a different language? Consider, however, that literature is food for the soul. The 100-mile-diet may be attractive to environmentalists, and people can certainly live on what is produced locally, but there’d be so much that we would be missing if we limited ourselves only to those texts readily available to us.
Read more…
The Images and Words Festival is a true literary celebration spanning language and culture. Those who love good literature will not only enjoy literary works in the Spanish language; they will also enjoy their precise and artistic translations in English and French. Furthermore, Spanish speakers will also be able to familiarize themselves with the literary creations of Canadian writers of other origins through the translation of their work into Spanish.
The practice of translation as a facilitator of reciprocal understanding and appreciation, however, represents only one aspect of the Festival. Other events include round-table discussions in which the creative works of the Festival guest writers will be studied. The literary section of the Festival also offers to the public a great variety of readings of original works, as well as book launches, musical concerts, stage performances, and so much more.
For more information, visit the festival website here.
Paulina Derbez
In 2005, my husband and I took the decision to move from Mexico City to Toronto, Canada. The motivation behind our move was both professional and personal, as my husband had lived a part of his childhood in Toronto, and I had previously had the opportunity to perform in one of Toronto’s major festivals. It was not an easy decision to make, but I personally felt a strong impulse to make a big change. And indeed, it was a big change; much bigger than we had expected.
Read more…
At Peace
Amado Ruiz de Nervo y Ordaz is, without doubt, one of the most outstanding poets of the Mexican literary canon. Born in Tepic, Nayarit in 1870, he moved to Mexico City in 1894, where he soon became a prominent journalist and published his first works. In 1900 he travelled to Paris, and later worked for the Mexican government as a diplomat in Madrid, Buenos Aires and Montevideo. A consummate novelist and essayist, Nervo is nevertheless best remembered for his poetry, whose delicate combination of mysticism and melancholy makes him perhaps one of the most emblematic ambassadors of the Mexican soul.
Read more…
The Whirling of the Serpent: Quetzalcoatl Resurrected
Author: José Luis Díaz
Translated by Martin Boyd
Publisher: Antares
Toronto, 2009
Review by Tania Hernández Cervantes
If you want to understand the origins of a nation, look at the myths that give it life. Myths, like symbols, the ideological, utopian dreams of individuals and of peoples, describe us. If it were not so, national flags would have no meaning. Quetzalcoatl is one of those myths which, in spite of the rationalism of the modern era, survive in Mexico’s collective imagination. Quetzalcoatl is the bird with green, white and red feathers. It is the Mesoamerican myth of the dual god, bird and serpent. The Mexican flag bears its colours, and in the centre is an image of an eagle devouring a serpent, an indisputable allusion to Quetzalcoatl.
Read more…
The publishing house nuestra palabra is pleased to announce and invite the Spanish-speaking community in Canada and Hispano-Canadians living in other countries to participate in the 8th edition of its annual short story competition, the main aims of which are to promote reading and writing of literary works in Spanish and literary values among Spanish speakers in Canada.
The announcement of the winners and awarding of the prizes is scheduled to take place in September 2011. The jury will include Jorge Etcheverry, Beatriz Hausner, Hugh Hazelton and Alex Zisman. The deadline for submissions is June 30, 2011. Each short story must be no more than 1,500 words. The rules, winning stories and all updated information on the competition can be found at www.nuestrapalabra.ca.
Martin Boyd
In Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu (1980), John Felstiner’s self-reflective study of his approach to translating Pablo Neruda’s classic work Alturas de Macchu Picchu, the translator describes verse translation as “an essential act and art of literary criticism” (Felstiner 2). Since Felstiner wrote these words, the concept of translator as literary critic has become something of a recurring theme in translation theory, although few have developed the concept as fully as B. Folkart Di Stefano did in his article “Translation as Literary Criticism”, published in 1982. Just as Di Stefano argues that a translator must “bring the full apparatus of literary criticism to bear on the text before and while rendering it” (Di Stefano 254), Felstiner presents a solid argument that the process of translating a poem requires the translator “to find, by scholarly and analytic means, how the poet came to write this work” (37). Felstiner presents this task, as daunting as it sounds, as a journey deep into the world of the source text and its author, driven by a desire to truly understand them both: “I wanted some hold on what Pablo Neruda stood for. I could get that by taking his poem on its own terms and then translating it into my own” (10).
Read more…
