Je est un autre

Babel

The January issue of The White Review is a translation issue, edited by Daniel Medin, and features

The translator wanders into Babel and books himself into a cupboard.

Two languages on the same floor of Babel. – I was here first. – I’m not talking to you. – Keep the music down. – You call that music?

But the gardens of Babel? Who talks about them? Who planted them? Who tended them? cried the translator in his cups, slurring his words.

[See also, my interview with Adam Thirlwell on his translation project, Multiples, plus my essay in The Stinging Fly‘s translation issue on the potential of literature in translation.]