Group items tagged

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