Welcome to Hopscotch Translation

Hahn has little patience for the much-rehearsed tale of untranslatable words, those linguistic curiosities that periodically circulate online as evidence that other languages have somehow cornered emotional territories inaccessible to the rest of us. Nor does he have much time for the opposite belief, according to which all linguistic difficulties eventually yield to sufficient ingenuity, technology, or theoretical confidence… READ MORE

Across our (still unfurling) conversations we’ve been circling (like an asymptotic dog about to sit but never quite sitting) a series of questions about how languages can co-habit space in multilingual texts. We’ve inherited certain choices as “correct” or “default”—we’re curious about how to make these defaults visible as choices while also imagining what other possibilities might exist… READ MORE

Wherever Lyamlahy uses the word ‘mémorial’ in the original, Schwartz translates it as ‘requiem’ to echo the title she has chosen—a quiet but profound act of coherence that knits the English version into itself, giving it its own internal logic. This is not translation as mere transference. It is translation as co-authorship, as architecture… READ MORE

Being your own translator means you can act on what the dissection reveals. I felt a constant urge to modify certain parts, not to correct the original but to deepen it. Gradually the Greek became an original in its own right, and parts of the French, in turn, became translations of it. Little by little, neither version was quite the original anymore. In the end I might say that both versions are originals… READ MORE