by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Exophony is the practice of writing in a language that is not one's own. Some exophonic authors are bilingual or multilingual from their childhood years while others write in an acquired language. Although the phenomenon is not new the term ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Hindu scholar and linguist Jeffrey Armstrong has spent the past 10 years translating and “decolonizing” the Bhagavad Gita, one of India's most famous epic poems, written 5.000 (some say 7.000) years ago. His work was published this month with the ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Emily Wilson's 2017 English translation of The Odyssey raised quite a stir for its its audacious use of contemporary language and her gender neutral approach (see our blog article on this topic) but the new English version of the epic ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village In Emily Wilson's translations of the classics the Greek goddess Demeter has “cornrows in her hair”, Achilles is described as a “superhero”, and Odysseus, when disguised as an old, homeless man, carries a "tote bag"...(1) Wilson’s innovative approach to the ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Fiona Bell is a literary translator and scholar of Russian literature, based in Oxford. She won a highly competitive fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in 2018, and her translation of Natalia Meshchaninova's Stories received a 2020 PEN/Heim ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village "Planet Word", opening up in Washington DC on October 22, 2020, will be an interactive center dedicated to language arts. Its mission is to inspire a love of words and language and the project is grounded in the belief that ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Publishers around the world are reporting booming sales of "The Plague" (La Peste), an allegorical tale set in a town at the mercy of an epidemic, written by French Nobel prize writer Albert Camus in 1947. Penguin is rushing through a ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village In 1983 Italian academic, historian, semiologist, journalist and author Umberto Eco published his first novel, Il nome della rosa (The name of the rose). The book became a literary event almost overnight and was on the best-seller list practically everywhere ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The French film Les traducteurs (The Translators) premiered last year in November at the French Film Festival in Prague. The plot follows a group of nine talented polyglots charged with translating the third installment of a fictitious Daedalus trilogy, a ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Neologisms related to the coronavirus pandemic are spreading so fast that it is hard to keep up and our article on this topic of March 25 is already out of date! We have picked up some new terms here and ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village "Multiples", is an anthology of multiple translations edited by world-acclaimed British novelist Adam Thirlwell and published in 2013. Thirlwell chose 12 stories, written in Danish, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, German, Arabic, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Italian, Hungarian and English, and asked the sixty-one ... Read more >
by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Félix Fénéon (1861-1944), was a writer, journalist, art critic, art dealer and publisher who "shook up the world of literature" in the early 1900s by inventing a new literary genre: the "news in three lines." (1) Fénéon was employed by ... Read more >