USEFULNESS AND MOREThe Cahiers series, edited by Dan Gunn: Writing Beckett's Letters . By George Craig. Animalinside. By LÁszlÓ Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann. Clarice: The Visitor. By Idra Novey. Józef Czapski: A Life in Translation. By Keith Botsford. Notes from the Hall of Uselessness. By Simon Leys
2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 66; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/escrit/cgv026
ISSN1471-6852
Autores Tópico(s)Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies
ResumoThe Cahiers series* is a collection of booklets (twenty-five issues as of this writing) with the goal of presenting ‘new explorations in writing, in translating, and in the areas linking these two activities’. The cahiers are unified by a visual element that provides breadth of content to each. For Dan Gunn, the series editor, the governing principle regarding the pairing of text with image is not to illustrate the text but ‘to provide it with a parallel “text” against which it can shine the more brilliantly’. This is an enterprise that unfolds on many levels and covers a wide range. The five titles reviewed here offer a glimpse – in no way exhaustive – of the various ways in which the relation between the creative process and the art of translation is engaged. In Writing Beckett's Letters, George Craig draws on fifteen years of experience – translating Beckett's French into English to discuss the pitfalls and rewards of translating. The cahier is interspersed with images of Beckett's handwritten letters, postcards, and envelopes, bringing both immediacy and intimacy to Craig's meditations. For Gunn, a Beckett scholar and one of the editors of the Cambridge University Press edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, the visual component of the cahier is of particular importance: ‘I tried to give a very palpable sense of the letters as material objects – their colour, mood, and the handwriting as Beckett's recipients might have perceived it’.
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