Creative Constraints: Translation and Authorship by Rita Wilson & Leah Gerber, ed.

Abstract

156 World Literature Today reviews once attributed to a photograph. Despite this broad generalization, the photograph still has the power to stun us and capture our attention. Such is the case with Robert Adams’s traveling retrospective exhibition organized by Yale University Art Gallery and represented in the three-volume catalog The Place We Live, which covers the period from 1964 to 2009. Adams’s black-andwhite images are at once sublime and uneventful. His document of the American landscape is not the grandeur of Ansel Adams (no relationship) but a carefully considered portrait of our daily surroundings presented in a manner that gradually leaves us more breathless than the magnificent photographs of Ansel. Robert approaches his subjects with a simplicity and formality that belies the complexity of visual cognition that frame his work. He exploits the image to inform us about the presence of humanity and the delicate balance that mankind shares with nature. The character of his images is accurately revealed in this catalog and covers a lifetime of image-making from Colorado and beyond. The first and second volumes portray the explorations that are revealed in many of his projects and their resulting books; the exhibit, just as the catalog reinforces, is sequenced according to the project presented. Each reproduction maintains the elegance of the original museum experience by carefully isolating the image from its immediate surroundings while simultaneously retaining its connection to the pieces selected to represent a project. The decision to place the texts at the end of the book allows readers to consult additional resources without interfering with the photographs themselves. Adams’s images are lyrical and poetic , portraying the qualities that light (or dark) reveal. Extreme care has gone into the editing and production of this work, including numerous cross-country travels to carry the proof sheets to Adams for final approval. The results are memorable. The third volume offers the reader an overview of each of the projects Adams has produced as a book represented by the cover design and several page spreads accompanying. The Place We Live confirms not only the significance of Robert Adams’s contributions to photographic art but, more importantly , his singular commitment to his own vision. It is, like the exhibition it stems from, a confirmation that in the right hands, photography remains a powerful medium. Andrew L. Strout University of Oklahoma Creative Constraints: Translation and Authorship. Rita Wilson & Leah Gerber, ed. Clayton, Victoria, Australia. Monash University Publishing (isbs, distr.). 2012. isbn 9781921867897 Participants in the 2011 inaugural Literary Translation Summer School— run under the auspices of Monash University’s School of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics in collaboration with the British Centre for Literary Translation—wrote most of the contributions to Creative Constraints. Each essay discusses the relationship between the creative freedom of the literary translator and the many constraints to which translation is subject ; and each, in its own way, shows that translation is a re-creation, an interpretation, or an actual creative writing based on an original in another language and thus a transmutation of the original. The old saying “traduttore, tradittore ” is very apt. It enabled Octavio Paz, the translator, to turn it into “traduttore, creatore”—as Graciela Isnardi said in praising his translations . Fidelity to the original text is Rane Willerslev On the Run in Siberia Coilín ÓhAiseadha, tr. University of Minnesota Press Danish anthropologist Rane Willerslev embarks on a mission to start a fair-trade fur cooperation with the indigenous Yukaghir, but things quickly turn dangerous. Facing starvation and the harsh trials of winter, this memoir chronicles a year spent in isolation and on the run from political corruption. march –april 2013 • 157 Ivan Vladislavić The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories Sunandini Banerjee, ill. Seagull Books Part personal examination, part descriptive musing, these short stories and essays paired with striking illustrations by Sunandini Banerjee delve into the writing process, particularly looking at stories that are never finished. Vladislavić analyzes his literary failures to discover why they did not succeed while also offering homages to his favorite authors. Nota Bene practiced best when combined with creative imagination in translating, much as when Emily Dickinson, urging poets to tell the truth, said, “tell...