It was such a pleasure to listen to Professor Maurer’s podcast on Lorca. I loved learning about Lorca's relationship with Dali. I was especially struck by the ending of the podcast in the reflections on Lorca’s characters not knowing entirely what they want, and idea of the dialectics of presence and absence. I thought about this dialectic a lot in Levine’s essay when she presents the bind of the feminist translator (e.g., “All who use the mother’s father-tongue, who echo the ideas and discourse of great men are, in a sense, betrayers: this is the contradiction and compromise of dissidence” (92)). It also felt relevant after Chloe Garcia Roberts’ talk on Friday, and the desire to be visible as a translator. I love the idea of translators leaving a trace of themselves in their work (and for the record, I’m very pro Deborah Smith). I had a lot of fun reading Robert Bly’s “The Eight Stages of Translation.” I personally love a step-by-step guide to doing something. Inspired by Val’s Nabokov assistant, I uploaded this essay into Terrier GPT (inputs are not used to train the models, don’t freak out) and asked it to prompt me with questions that Robert Bly might ask me as I approached my Proust translation. With Robot Bly’s assistance, I found myself able to zero in on specific verbs, tone, paradox, and diction in ways I probably would not have gotten to on my own. As always, I wish I had more time to spend on my translation! It always feels like something I could work on forever!
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