Mis pensamientos mientras estoy leyendo Doña Bárbara...
As many of you know, I love reading works written in Spanish. Found myself thinking during my long commute back home a couple of days ago about the difficulties it is for non-English fictions, particularly speculative fiction works, to be translated and published in the U.S. and U.K. markets. If the stories are short fictions, it becomes even more difficult to be published, as I can recall only two recent collections of Latin American/Spanish fictions, Cosmos Latinos (SF-oriented; published back in 2003) and the upcoming bilingual Best of Mexican Contemporary Fiction (mostly mimetic fiction, with some stories containing speculative elements).
For each of those two collections, each was published in part due to academic grants given to Wesleyan and Dalkey Archive. I wonder if it'll take something akin to that for the associated translation/transcription costs to be paid. If I had the time (which sadly I don't right now, as I'm really busy with the teaching aspects of my professional life), I would probably investigate this further, but does anyone reading this know of any such grant-giving institutions that might sponsor a SF-related anthology of translated fictions? Or for that matter, of any other anthologies of translated Spanish/Latin American literature?
The Empirical Approach to Learning
1 day ago
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2 comments:
Larry, did you ever consider translating speculative Spanish fiction? From the translations you've posted on your blog taken from various books it seems to me that you might do a good job, should you put your mind to it :)
I have indeed considered it, but I know enough from experience that I need more formal training in the language first, as I got a friend of mine from El Salvador to proof everything for me. Maybe in a few years I'll be decent enough to be able to attempt to translate fictions (which I believe would be more difficult than translating interviews).
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