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Translation, A Love Story:
Translator listens to The Allusionist. Translator hears about the podcast The Memory Palace. Translator listens to The Memory Palace. Translator immediately becomes smitten with The Memory Palace. Translator translates The Memory Palace from English to Brazilian Portuguese, and turns it into a book - O Palácio da Memória - which will be published in Brazil two weeks hence.
But, like any love story, it's not quite that simple.
Literary translator Caetano Galindo recounts the trials and treats of turning Nate DiMeo's English language audio into Brazilian Portuguese text.
READING MATTER:
I can't get enough of articles about the choices they make to translate all the jokes and names in the Asterix books. Here's one, here's another.
Radio Atlas adds English subtitles to beautiful sound-rich radio documentaries in other languages.
Novelist Scarlet Thomas's charming correspondence with her Russian translator about the tricky little parts of the job.
Translating Dr Seuss into Latin (and remember the episode about translating modern words into Latin for the radio news bulletin?).
Simon Armitage's modern English version of Gawain and the Green Knight is a beautiful example of a translation that works on its own, but also captures the character of the original language (Middle English had some fiddly alliteration and scansion that he did not chicken out of emulating).
A recipe for pão de queijo, the Brazilian cheese buns which came about because of...cyanide??
There's a transcript of this episode at theallusionist.org/transcripts/translation.
ADDENDUM: Caetano has translated the Soothing Words episode of the Tranquillusionist into Brazilian Portuguese! Click here to hear.
YOUR RANDOMLY SELECTED WORD FROM THE DICTIONARY:
quinella
CREDITS:
Caetano Galindo is a multiple award-winning translator who has translated David Foster Wallace, Alice Munro, Charles Darwin, TS Eliot, Thomas Pynchon, Tom Stoppard, James Joyce - and now Nate DiMeo. His book Yes, I Say Yes: a Guided Tour of James Joyce’s Ulysses is out now in Brazilian Portuguese.
Nate DiMeo makes the podcast The Memory Palace, which you'll find at thememorypalace.us or in your podcatcher of choice. If you prefer to take your podcasts written down in Brazilian Portuguese, brace yourself: O Palácio da Memória will be published by Todavia on 12 July. You can also hear him in Toki Pona, one of my favourite episodes of The Allusionist.
This episode was produced by me; the music is by Martin Austwick. If you didn't hear his work on the previous episode, put your headphones on and get over to theallusionist.org/eclipse NOW. Afterwards, you can download his Total Eclipse of the Heart-inspired score here.
