Yardenne Greenspan on Translation and Foreign-ness

My dear friend Yardenne Greenspan just had her translation of Israeli fiction published by New Vessel Press last week (congrats!). World Literature Today ran an interview with her, where she says some really smart things about translation:

There are so many interesting theories on translation, and many of them focus on the question of foreign-ness versus seamlessness; how natural do you want the translation to sound in English versus how much of an “exotic” feel do you want to preserve. I think a good balance is necessary. You don’t want readers to have to pause and scratch their heads at weird sentence structures or grammatical awkwardness, but on the other hand, you want to give them that little something, that curiosity that comes with reading something set in a new place, where people speak differently and joke differently and love differently.

Read the full interview here, and buy Yardenne’s translation of Some Day by Shemi Zarhin here (e-book or print).