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Weiye Loh

Asymptote: Literary Encounters Between Languages and Cultures  | the kent rid... - 0 views

kentridgecommon.com/?p=10045

Language Translation

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Asymptote is a new, international literary journal dedicated to the translation of literary works, both from various languages to English as well as from English to other languages. It was founded by our very own Singaporean writer, Lee Yew Leong, whose editorial team spans various continents and cultures – South Asia, the Middle East, Europe, America and East Asia – and is a veritable international, multi-cultural and multilingual task force.
  • A ‘classic’ metaphor comes from the Italian – “traduttore, traditore”, which means “translator, traitor”. My teacher had written this phrase on the board in my first translation class, demonstrating her (rather cynical) philosophical stance on the whole project of translation – something is always ‘lost in translation’, and the translator necessarily interferes in this gap of meaning guided her own bias, conscious or unconscious, political or philosophical.
  • In philosophy classes my charismatic and wildly esoteric professor once railed on about the possibility (or impossibility) of commensuration between various little narratives ( petits récits ), given the rejection of ‘modernist’ grand or meta-narratives. But translation, he declared dramatically, the possibility of translation hints at the possibility of commensurability between the little narratives. In his view, little narratives were understood as discrete cultures (Japanese, Iranian, Russian) and inter-cultural communication (and consequent kindness and friendliness amongst humankind) is only possible if translation is possible.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The Asymptote raison d’être is much more optimistic than my translation teacher’s stance, and much less abstruse than that of my philosophy professor’s. The editors write, “We are interested in encounters between languages and the consequences of these encounters. Though a translation may never fully replicate the original in effect (thus our name, “asymptote”: the dotted line on a graph that a mathematical function may tend towards but never reach), it is in itself an act of creation. … The value of translation is that it unleashes from latency ideas and emotions to a vast sea of others who do not have access to the language in which these ideas and emotions reside.”
  • With the asymptote, the y-axis and the x-axis will never get lonely, pairing off into the infinite distance and the distant infinity; the original text and its companion translations proliferate in the blinker-free world wide net, reaching a broader readership and our earthly community grows closer with a shared cache of stories, tales, imaginations.
  • In addition, “[n]ot only will [Asymptote] display work in its original language after the English translation, [but they] also encourage translators (especially of poems) to provide audio recordings of the original work so that the reader has access as well to the sounds of that language, via a “Press PLAY” audio option whenever such an MP3 recording is available.” This project straddles cultures, languages as well as media – writing, audio and even visual
  • Weiye Loh on 20 Feb 11
     
    Koh Choon Hwee
Weiye Loh

Balderdash: The Writing of Fiction - 0 views

gssq.blogspot.com/...writing-of-fiction.html

Simulacrum Art Imitation Originality Writing Fiction

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 13 Feb 12
     
    True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own; and the mind which would bring this secret germ to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience. To know any one thing one must not only know something of a great many others, but also, as Matthew Arnold long since pointed out, a great deal more of one's immediate subject than any partial presentation of it visibly includes
Bri Zabriskie

Also bought this the other day. A copy of Huckleberry Finn pr... on Twitpic - 0 views

twitpic.com/53loto

HuckleBerry Huck Finn huckleberry Finn mark twain literary research

shared by Bri Zabriskie on 03 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Bri Zabriskie on 03 Jun 11
     
    SOmeone tweeted a picture of their original 1945 copy of Huck Finn :)
Weiye Loh

Victorian Literature, Statistically Analyzed With New Process - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...04victorian.html

Literature Statistics Content Analysis

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • A decline in references to “God,” “Christian” and “universal” is consonant with the conventional view that the 19th century was a time of rising secularism and skepticism.
  • Yet large searches can also challenge some pet theories of close reading, he said: for example, that the Victorians were obsessed with the nature and origins of evil. As it turns out, books with the word “evil” in the title bumped along near the bottom of the graph, accounting for less than 0.1 percent — a thousandth — of those published during the Victorian era.
  • As Mr. Cohen is quick to acknowledge, the meaning of those numbers is anything but clear. Perhaps authors didn’t like to use the word “evil” in the title; perhaps there were other, more common synonyms; perhaps the context points to another subject altogether.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Ms. Martin at Princeton knows firsthand how electronic searches can unearth both obscure texts and dead ends. She has spent the last 10 years compiling a list of books, newspaper and journal articles about the technical aspects of poetry. She recalled finding a sudden explosion of the words “syntax” and “prosody” in 1832, suggesting a spirited debate about poetic structure. But it turned out that Dr. Syntax and Prosody were the names of two racehorses.
  • Weiye Loh on 04 Dec 10
     
    A decline in references to "God," "Christian" and "universal" is consonant with the conventional view that the 19th century was a time of rising secularism and skepticism.
Weiye Loh

Internet Archive starts backing up digital books on paper - 3 views

arstechnica.com/...-up-digital-books-on-paper.ars

Digital Books

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Bri Zabriskie on 14 Jun 11
     
    this is interesting but how do they KNOW what the "original copy" is. and I just submitted a random homework assignment as a "book" to IA as a test to see if we could upload a copy of our ebook that we wrote as a class for ENGL 295. Are they just going to store those "books" people randomly upload as well? Who determines what goes in the hardcopy archive?
  • Derrick Clements on 05 Jul 11
     
    That is sounds like it could be the headline for The Onion!
Bri Zabriskie

Egypt Revolution 2011: A Complete Guide To The Unrest - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-revolution-2011_n_816026.html

shared by Bri Zabriskie on 06 May 11 - No Cached
  • Bri Zabriskie on 06 May 11
     
    can't find the original post with the tweet list but this is a cool example of the format news takes in the digital age. LOOK at all those links and it's short and concise with lots of little lists and such.
Weiye Loh

Kamila Shamsie on the perils and delights of translation | Books | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ila-shamsie-author-translation

Translation Reading Language Culture

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • When it comes to books of high merit, the translated sentence that fails to relay some nuance or music of the original, is tinged with loss; the translated sentence that doesn't understand the nuance or music to begin with is negligent; the untranslated sentence is a terrible deprivation.
  • "translated" and "foreign" are two separate things – sometimes a translated world can feel far more familiar than the foreign worlds I might find in a novel of the English language; and as a reader I am at home with both familiarity and foreignness.
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