Category: Translator
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Best Dressed: How Cinderella Got into the Ball
I’ve been thinking about balls a lot lately, thanks to my translation of Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 2: Spectacle. The author, Céleste Mogador, attends her first ball as young woman and eventually earns fame and her sobriquet, Mogador, while dancing with and for all the high-born young men in Paris.
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This Was Supposed to Be a Book Review
I have notes, quotes, and a half-assed draft of a book review waiting in the Wingback wings. This was the weekend I was going to pull it all together and publish it on Monday. However. Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 2: Spectacle has been to the proofreader and the layout has been completed. I…
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Today Was a Good Day
As I opened my book to read for a while before going to bed, I realized I had had a very good day. I made a list in my bullet journal to remind myself what made it good; I thought it might be worth sharing and spelling out—briefly!—why these were good things. The Morning Run…
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Ineffectual Thorns
I recently pruned my roses, as I do every February. I used to do this on or after Valentine’s Day, but climate change is real and upon us, so now this chore gets done at the beginning of February. It’s a pleasant chore, the kind that makes a noticeable and immediate difference when it’s done.…
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Hot Takes on Cold English
When winter storms bring the city to a halt, I apparently think of poetry, which I’m kind of surprised to learn about myself. In 2021, when ice encapsulated every twig and leaf of every tree and shrub and bent them to the ground, I thought of Robert Frost’s “Birches.” This year, as a storm that…
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Rebellion: Behind the Scenes
Tomorrow, January 16, 2024, my translation of Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 1: Rebellion will be published. I’m really proud of this project, and it’s gotten great reviews from advance readers. So far it’s earned four out of five stars on NetGalley, which makes me happy. Paperback and ebook copies will be available just…
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Miraculous Nuns of the 7th and 21st Centuries
The New York Times is reporting from towns across the country to explore “how America defines itself one place at a time.” On September 9, the dispatch came from an abbey in Gower, Missouri. The founder of the Abbey of Our Lady of Ephesus, Sister Wilhelmina—a real firecracker, from the descriptions—died in 2019. She was…
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Mogador: A Translation Diary
When I started revising my translation Celeste Mogador’s memoir from 1848, I thought I’d try keeping a translation journal, similar maybe to the writing journals Steinbeck kept while he worked on his novels. I took a month off of editing work over the holidays just to work on this book, so it was a limited-duration…
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That One Time I Was Wrong
A few weeks ago, I was struggling with a paper I needed to write for my course on Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. We’re reading his translation as well as the original in Old English, and critiques of and essays about both poems, plus many of Heaney’s other poems. The assignment was to respond to…
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Bête of Burden
During the first summer of the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, I decided to tackle my first translation of a book from French to English. Voyage Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre seemed like an obvious choice that summer, since it’s a novel about the author’s house arrest in the late eighteenth century. He spent…