when searching today for lit news of translation and babylon I came up with this review from the Toronto Globe and Mail...
Dialogue with the dead
www.theglobeandmail.com/books/review-the-changeling-by-kenzaburo-oe/article1518432/
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Reviewed by Malcolm Sutton
Globe and Mail Update Published on Wednesday, Mar. 31, 2010
Kenzaburo Oe’s brother-in-law and friend from youth was filmmaker Juzo Itami, known in the West primarily for his 1985 film Tampopo. In 1997, some time after suffering a knife attack by right-wing gangsters he had satirized in one of his films, Itami ended his life by leaping from a building.
Oe begins The Changeling, as in a number of his novels, from insoluble, deeply personal events – here from his friend’s suicide – and turns it through sets of fictional tests, dialogues, memories and perverse events. And here, as in those other novels, Oe edges his readers toward the sublime through his restrained distortions of reality.
The Changeling begins with Kogito, an aging Oe-like writer, wearing oversized headphones, listening to a cassette-tape recording that his brother-in-law, Goro, has prepared for him. Goro’s voice speaks: “I’m going to head over to the Other Side now. … But don’t worry, I’m not going to stop communicating with you.” After slipping into an unpleasant doze, Kogito opens his eyes to find his wife before him, telling him of Goro’s suicide.
w o r d s p a c e has a daily project: words in the news. Random encounters with news of words reforming and asserting around the world. Today? w o r d spa c e googled "language words news poetry meaning" and got a bit of Shakepeare redux news from Augusta, Ga where ASU's Dr. Walter Evans rewrote Midsummer's to get rid of the bard's phoniness...
">metrospirit.com/index.php?cat=1993101070593169&ShowArticle_ID=11013003100787959 Alice Wynn
...The stories of the four young lovers — Lysander (Michael Lay), Hermia (Chelse Stetz), Demetrius (Eric Mills) and Helena (Elizabeth Miller) — remain the same, although now they have Facebook and Twitter.
“There are a lot of contemporary things happening just like if the play were happening in present day. I think people will be able to take this project for what it is and enjoy it and they’ll be able to understand it completely,” he said.
In translating the story line by line, Evans wanted to make the language more accessible as well as make it more enjoyable for audiences. He did, however, adhere to a few of the rules.
“Our version, where Shakespeare uses prose, we use prose. Where he uses blank verse… we do that. When he has rhyme with eight-syllable lines or three-syllable lines, whether it’s couplets or more complicated rhymes, we imitate that,” Evans said. “When you read Shakespeare, or see one of his plays performed, the poetry sounds phony; it sounds phony because the words sound phony. But when you do it in modern language, it starts sounding like fun.”