Goin’ Backstory: January 2017

“Translation is, we’re told, something that’s supposed to be invisible,” Shelley Frisch *81 tells PAW’s Carrie Compton. “I don’t think that that’s so. I think that a translator needs to inject a voice into a text in order to make it live. It shouldn’t read like plain vanilla translation-ese.” Frisch explains her work translating biographies from German to English and the specific case of Reiner Stach’s three-part Franz Kafka biography. Also, in an abbreviated version of our regular discussion of Princeton history, Brett Tomlinson and Gregg Lange ’70 talk about the 1960s critical languages program and a modern-day analog.