The history of dollar

  • Posted by Stephen Whiteley
  • On 29/12/2015
  • English, etymology, Linguistics, literary translation, literature, Spanish
The word dollar has a curious and convoluted history: It is derived, as a word, from Thaler, which itself comes from the  Joachimsthal silver mine in Bohemia. In 1519, the silver from Joachimsthal was first used to mint the Bohemian coin Guldengroschen (‘great guilder’, made of silver but equal in value to a gold guilder). […]
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Cortazar and Yourcenar

  • Posted by Stephen Whiteley
  • On 29/12/2013
  • literary translation, literature
I have just started reading Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien (Paris, 1951) in Julio Cortázar’s Spanish translation, Memorias de Adriano (Buenos Aires, 1955). It is a beautifully written book, and doesn’t seem to have suffered too much in the transition from French to Spanish. Of course, Cortázar was living in Paris when he made it, which […]
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Borges and Thurber on the (in)fidelity of translations

  • Posted by Stephen Whiteley
  • On 11/10/2013
  • le mot juste, literary translation, literature
“The original is unfaithful to the translation.” I came across this characteristically gnomic utterance in an essay by Borges on French writer William Beckford’s Vathek (1782). For Borges, translation was both a primary literary act and a primary metaphor for the literary act: many of his best stories revolve around the notion of the translation, […]
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Twentieth Century Hungarian Literature!

  • Posted by Stephen Whiteley
  • On 03/10/2013
  • Hungarian, Linguistics, literary translation, literature
After a recent trip to Budapest I decided to engage in a short survey of English translations of Twentieth Century Hungarian literature. Here is my progress so far… I started with Sándor Márai, who wrote in his diary in 1949 that “the world has no need of Hungarian literature”. It is only in the last […]
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The political dimension of translation

  • Posted by Stephen Whiteley
  • On 26/07/2013
  • literary translation, literature, words
Last week, I quoted two authors’ divergent perspectives on writing in a language which has been imposed on your culture by a colonising power. Following on from this, today I want to look at a few approaches to the politics of literary translation. Tejaswini Niranjana’s book Siting Translation, History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (1995) […]
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