"Why is translation important, Adriana Jacobs asks? ‘It is not because people love or die in a different way in English,’ says Mishol, to a ripple of laughter. Instead, it’s because of what the ‘small details’ of any language can tell us about the people who speak it. In Hebrew, there is a saying that ‘life and death are in the hands of the language.’ It is a language with so many layers, Mishol explains, that ‘every word is connected to a whole family,’ and there is more wisdom in a poem than a poet herself possesses. Though necessarily incomplete, translation captures some of that expansive heritage."
Check out Theophilus Kwek's dispatch from Oxford Translation Day in Asymptote.
And here are some photos from the last two sessions of the day.
It was such a wonderful day – be sure to be there next year!
Comparative Criticism and Translation
