Welcome to Hopscotch Translation

Considering his extraordinary talents and qualifications, his exceptional command of and sensitivity to language, Nabokov’s Pushkin might have become a standout, an achievement setting a new and unsurpassable standard among the many translations of Eugene Onegin into English. From the outset, though, his version was mainly judged a serious failure… READ MORE

Any translation naturally has to be mindful of prosody in the sense of cadence, rhythm, tempo, meter, and other aural effects. Poetry in particular deploys its acoustical properties to underpin and even enact the content. Here, however, the acoustical element dominates to the exclusion of every other, and while folly rejoices in the self-contained quality of its play, no reader—or at least not this one—can help asking what the Zukofskys’ animating principle might have been… READ MORE

Hearing, after all, is the major faculty translators almost always stress as essential to their work. Seamus Heaney’s comment in the preface to his translation of Beowulf is pertinent: he was searching for the “tuning fork” that would enable him to find the right key and sound the right pitch for the music of the poem. He found it in the memory of storytelling in his home… READ MORE

How might poetry become its own kind of territory, a place not where historical wounds are necessarily resolved or healed, but where other possible futures or narratives can be imagined? Daniela’s work helps me think not only about the consequences of linguistic and territorial loss, but also about how literature can serve as a vital political tool for contesting entrenched narratives and creating language anew… READ MORE