translation fail

I’m translating a piece on Las Fallas – Valencia’s wonderful firework fiestas – and, as usual, I started off running the text through the Google translator to see if it would save me time.

Sadly, Google opts for an altogether different meaning for falla. This means that the phrase:

En la oficina de turismo podrás encontrar información sobre las diferentes rutas para contemplar las fallas más espectaculares.

becomes:

In the tourist office you can find information about different routes to see the most spectacular failures.

Perhaps human translators will be needed for a while yet.

reflection

On rainy nights the streets
are twice as bright. Light runs
in rivulets down pavements, streams
along gutters, swirling into storm drains, drips
from balconies and falls, dimpling
puddles.

 
 
(This is really only a true observation where there are streets with cars and street lights. Out here in the middle of nowhere, it seems to have been raining constantly for as long as I can remember, and there are no such cheerful lights to be mirrored and multiplied. Country living does, of course, have other compensations, but at the moment my mind is too waterlogged to think of them.)

digital pros

For reasons that may become apparent at a later date, I was looking at the wikipedia page about digital publishing.

Specifically, I was looking at the ‘comparison of e-books with printed books‘.

wikipedia e-book advantages
The very first ‘advantage of e-books’ caught my eye: Continue reading “digital pros”

poet and pretender

Last week, someone sent me a text that included this translated quotation from Pessoa:

El poeta es un fingidor.
Finge tan completamente
Que hasta finge que es dolor
El dolor que de veras siente.

No attribution was given to the translator, but it seems to be faithful enough to the original Portuguese that perhaps that isn’t necessary:

O poeta é um fingidor.
Finge tão completamente
Que chega a fingir que é dor
A dor que deveras sente.

Now, though, I’m wondering how on earth I’d say that in English.
Continue reading “poet and pretender”

nine lives

A friend has told me that, before he started discussing poetry with me – by which he probably means before he started listening to me rant about it – he thought poetry was mostly about “kittens”. By which he definitely means hearts-and-flowers and Hallmark-style fluffy kittens.

There is far too much bad cat poetry out there. I don’t mean Roger McGough’s Bad, Bad Cats, which contains gems such as The Cats’ Protection League; I mean the self-indulgent, fluffy stuff that gets me ranting about poetry.
Continue reading “nine lives”