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May 05, 2005

N.Y. EVENT - EDITH GROSSMAN

We're alerting MOTEV to this one:

Queen Sofia Spanish Institute cordially invites you to a lecture by Dr. Edith Grossman Acclaimed translator of Don Quixote

"Translating Don Quixote"
Introduced by Dr. Lía Schwartz de Lerner Distinguished Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature
The Graduate Center, CUNY

Tuesday 17 May 2005 6:00 p.m. 684 Park Avenue at 68 Street

Dr. Lía Schwartz de Lerner, Distinguished Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center at CUNY, will introduce Dr. Grossman. Dr. Edith Grossman is the distinguished, prize-winning translator and critic of contemporary Latin American literature. She has translated poetry, fiction and non-fiction by major Latin American writers, among them Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alvaro Mutis, Mayra Montero, Ariel Dorfman, Jaime Manrique, Augusto Monterroso, and Nicanor Parro. Grossman has said that her primary obligation as a literary translator is to recreate for the reader in English the experience of the reader in Spanish. With her Don Quixote she achieves this by finding the cadences of the modern voice in Cervantes' own words. "When Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, his language was not archaic or quaint," she explains. "He wrote in a crackling up-to-date Spanish that was an intrinsic part of his times, a modern language that both reflected and helped to shape the way people experienced the world." Harold Bloom, who contributes the introduction to this new edition says, "though there have been many valuable translations of Don Quixote in English, I would commend Edith Grossman's version for the extraordinarily high quality of her prose."

R.S.V.P. to Georgia Perris at 212.628.0420.   This event is open to the public.

Posted at 12:15 AM |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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