Welcome to Hopscotch Translation

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

Seeing how underground interest persisted and grew despite overt reprimands, the modern Turkish translation has sought to restore historical balance. It suggests that societies do not move linearly from “repressed” to “free.” Still, to many readers, these works appeared “foreign,” while their source material was perceived as borrowed. Readers often expressed disbelief at what their predecessors at the empire’s edge engaged with, such as cuckolding, lesbianism, impotence, and nymphomania… READ MORE

Vincenz boldly transforms “sleeping” to “dreaming” in the title that he gives to his translation, which is conceived in several of its facets as a tour de force. His interpretation can seemingly be construed in two ways. On the one hand, the narrator is dreaming of Jack (and, in the process, remembering his own childhood in the early 1950s and 1960s, the period graphically evoked in the novella) and, on the other hand, it is also perhaps Jack who, although dead, is somehow dreaming… READ MORE

Javier Cercas, himself a venerable author and one of the four writers (along with Grandes, Javier Marías, and Antonio Muñoz Molina) who are credited with “breaking the silence” after the Civil War and the ensuing Franco regime, said Grandes “made the Civil War past present” and called her “The Mirror of Spain.” So how is it that we in the US have hardly heard of an author so celebrated at home and abroad, and a veritable national treasure?… READ MORE