ALTA38: Translation & Traffic

Masterful writers often thwart the reader’s expectations, whether with a sentence that takes an unexpected turn rhythmically or a deftly-employed line break that causes a grammatical shift in how meaning unfolds. We will discuss our own strategies as translators to negotiate these subtle and precise effects of the sentence versus the line. How does one make a long, sinuous sentence work in English? What strategies can one use to test the integrity of the line and heighten its counterpoint to divisions of grammar and sense? Can these distinctions complement the idea of the poetic use of language to guide literary translators of any genre? We will tease out the possibilities of the sentence and the line as important—perhaps the most important—tools at our disposal and investigate the intuitive choices we make.