Changing Pieces

MGG: I still remember “my first time” as a translator very clearly, and fondly. In fact, it entailed two very different experiences. The first took place when I was around nine or ten years old, in the basement of a bar in the Montparnasse neighborhood in the south of Paris. It was an establishment exclusively for habitués; to get in, you had to knock on the door, and the owner would first look through the spyhole. In French, like in English, a “spyhole” is actually called a “judas” – seeing without being seen supposedly equates to betrayal. At any rate, I was there with my older brother, who didn’t speak Spanish, and a friend of my father’s from Spain, who didn’t speak French. The two were having a heated argument about the Communist Party being blind to Stalinist crimes, the lies of the Soviet regime, etc.AH: I was at the Avignon Festival once and saw a play about Stalin. During the play, Stalinist supporters outside were heard cheering for “the supreme leader.” I’d just moved to Fra...

In recent years, popular culture has witnessed the proliferation of violent female characters, while female criminality has also received increasing attention from many critics and academics. These women remain a fascination for both mainstream culture and researchers as their acts go against cultural conceptions and are even viewed as antithetical to femininity. And while the increasing presence of female violence in media and popular culture may be symptomatic of present-day society’s concerns about gender behavior, the portrayal of violent women still seems to be following genre conventions and familiar stereotypes that inevitably frame, and thus normalize, their acts within boundaries of traditional discourses on femininity. In that regard, Women Who Kill: Gender and Sexuality in Film and Series of the Post-Feminist Era presents itself as a particularly timely book that investigates the representation of women who kill in a so-called postfeminist context recognized principally by a...

Characters: Over the chimneys, streaks of clouds and smoke across the sky. It is a wet and dismal night. A Saint-Petersburg mansion. In the lordly entrance, stands ARLEKIN in his tights and bells, and he follows the walkers with his eyes.TEACHER (enters, music is heard in the distance) ARLEKIN: Let me guide you. TEACHER: Impudent! ARLEKIN: Ah, no. Have pity! Please, let me guide you… Just from afar. TEACHER: Where are the police when you need them? ARLEKIN (somewhat breaking): My autumn looooove…TEACHER: Leave me!ARLEKIN (earnestly, and with misunderstood power): My queen…TEACHER (is silent) ARLEKIN: I love… you are so beautiful! Are you always so beautiful on autumn nights? TEACHER (as if in a frenzy): Scoff and scoff again! I am a single, thin woman. They pay me twenty rubles… like I’m a cook! I am tired! My voice is hoarse! You listen to me, my voice is hoarse, on my eternally hoarse lips, and I cannot dream of fantasies! ARLEKIN: Ah, no! It’s just, it seems, I’ve only had one dream...

“More liquor,” said the dark-skinned man holding out his glass.“No more liquor,” said the fat man grabbing the bottle from the counter. “Indian dance now; liquor later.”“Liquor,” said the dark-skinned man stretching for the bottle.“Afterwards,” said the fat man, shielding the bottle behind his vast bulk. “Now Indian dance.” He waggled his hips and his flabby belly shook. “Now Indian dance out front. Everyone watch Indian dancing.”The dark-skinned man stopped and stared at his fat counterpart, stared at him as a famished, skittish dog might at a person chewing a sandwich in a roadside bar. The fat man waggled his hips once more, his arms upraised, the bottle in one hand and a shot glass he was drinking from in the other. The dark-skinned man chuckled.“You like that, eh?” said the fat man. His flabby jowls wobbled with laughter, his eyes vanishing between puffy little lids. “Off you go, Indian. Bwana want to see Indian dance. Me bwana, you Indian, monkey.”“Not monkey.” The Indian shook h...

The paper investigates the extent and peculiarities of censorship in two Croatian editions of Pippi Longstocking, a classic of Swedish and world children's literature. Comparing the original Swedish text, contained in three books: Pippi Langstrump (1945/1948), Pippi Langstrump gar ombord (1946/1969) and Pippi Langstrump and Söderhavet (1948/1969), with the first edition of the Croatian translation published in 1973 and its revised 1996 edition shows significant differences in the number, layout, and title of chapters, and establishes the diversity of taboo topics present in both omitted and retained chapters. The retained chapters, after joining the micro-strategies previously adapted to the collected data (according to Desmet, Davoodi), also reveal clear variability in the way of translating taboo topics, such as inappropriate behavior, life (mis)fortunes, violence, racial intolerance, and religion.Keywords: Swedish children’s literature, censorship, taboo topics, translation micro-st...

This paper analyzes the covers of the weekly newspaper Novosti, on which the current refugee and migrant crisis is depicted with illustrations where various verbal and visual signs recontextualize the motif of barbed and razor wire. The symbolic, satiric, and metaphoric potential of barbed wire is discussed, and its functions in the narrative on migrants are defined. The examples are categorized according to the distinct semantic characteristics of acting on the body and enclosing space, and the presented research model confirms that the pronounced artistic and critical functionality of the motif of barbed wire lies precisely in the potential of establishing an antithesis that is simultaneously also an element of the satirical dialectic and the source of metaphoric interpretations. Keywords: barbed wire, satire, symbol, conceptual metaphor, semanticsWriting a summary for the history of barbed wire, from the prairies and war trenches to concentration camps, Razac (2009) stops at the con...