18/03 Reading Response - Sanjana Thakur

I'm so sorry this is so late! 

Godayol, "Metaphors, women and translation"

• The bottom of page 100 listing out the "different models of sexual relationships in translation discourses" was amusing. The gender metaphor does seem like it relies on patriarchal ideas to sustain itself. 
• The metaphor of the borderland, the in-between or interstitial, feels far more compelling to me, especially since that can link us more smoothly to the concepts of foreignising and domesticating texts that have been essential to our class conversations this semester. 
• "To translate is to live between difference and non-difference, in a state of dissolution where centres are inexistent... There are mysteries, surprises and questions that remain unanswerable but that nevertheless must be voiced. It implies recognising that solutions are often only partial and always varied" (107-108). 
• I was interested in how autoethnography comes up here––I've learnt it in the anthropological context as a term that lends academic legitimacy to personal or anecdotal experience. q
• With "cultural mothers of translation" and the Athena/Medusa stuff it felt like the last section was coming back around to the gender metaphor. 

Cavanagh, "The Art of Losing"

• I really enjoyed reading this essay! Of course I know "One Art", but Cavanagh introduced me to so many wonderful translations here. 
• "All loss is converted into gain" (238). 
• "This is what I will call the tradition of 'joyful failure,' in which the poet is plagued not so much by the world's emptiness as by its unplumbable abundance. 'You can't have everything. Where would you put it?' the comedian Steven Wright asks. Certainly not in a single poem, or even in a single human life" (241). 
• I appreciated the expansive nature of this essay––Cavanagh draws in so many people and ideas and still makes the essay readable. 

Pelczar, "Wislawa Szymborska"

• She seems like a wonderful poet and person and I'm excited to work on this week's translation exercise!
• The description of her poems as "unusual" and "humane" is lovely. 

Other random thoughts:

• As I was writing this post, a translation by Clare Cavanagh of Anna Kamienska's "Funny" popped up serendipitously to the top of my Instagram page. I enjoyed it a lot and am attaching it below. 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Over Spring Break, I went to an Argentine bookstore in D.C. called Flor and loved their stairs and their book collection! They had lots of Lorca and Borges. I bought a copy of "Elena Knows" by Claudia Pineiro, translated by Frances Riddle, that I am very excited to read.