Friday, October 05, 2012

NEW: Translation Collaborations

Announcing a new section I'm hoping will be of interest to you: I've been getting my feet wet in the grand river of Poetry Translation - always a big interest for me but never having the proficiency to translate myself. My knowledge is limited to high school Spanish, a semester of college French, Italian in Junior High and a lifetime of opera; German also from opera; Latin from the Catholic Mass; I also have a tiny smattering of Sicilian - the only language other than English that I have a truly decent knowledge of is a bizarre Albanian-Sicilian dialect which I understand but cannot write and can speak only under dire circumstances (!) ===================================== Now, thanks to upcoming novelist Rosaliene Bacchus, I've been collaborating on the translation of Portuguese poets - that is, Brazillian Portuguese. It works like this: Rosaliene is fluent in Portuguese and provides me with a literal translation. I then gather information on the poet, hopefully including audio, and use my smatterings of romance languages to develop what I consider a replica of the original in English, So far, we have done 4 collaborations and they are all posted on Rosaliene's fine website, "Three Worlds, One Vision". Click here for the site and then click onto "Poetry Corner". October, 2012 features our latest effort. The others are under "Archives": July, 2012; April, 2012; and July 2011. ===================================== I hope you will take a look at both the poetry and the many interesting features on Rosaliene's site. This has been quite an adventure which I hope to continue and expand - Comments, as always, are welcome.