Julio Cortazar, A Novelist

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Julio Cortázar is a famous novelist from Argentina. He was born August 26, 1914 in Brussels, Belgium and died February 12, 1984 at the age of 70 years young. Otherness is the foundation of translation in almost every sense of the word. The translator must become the author's other, his Doppelganger, what Julio Cortázar called his paredros, using a Greek term for an old Egyptian concept of otherness. At the same time the translator must turn the author into another possibility of his own existence. The writer stays himself but is now writing in another language and therefore at least partially in another culture. Also, there will be more than one translation of a classic, meaning that even in its otherness the classic has other possibilities. Mandelbaum, Singleton, Sayers, and Ciardi are all partially Dante in that they are his others, yet they are not clones, not even identical twins, and usually not even close enough to be fraternal ones. Theirs is anotherness within the same language, different variations on the same theme as it were.

As I reflect on my origins and subsequent life I see that although I like to say that my entry into the craft of translation was purely serendipitous, in truth I had been tutored for it by that same serendipity, which now looks remarkably like fate, even one that John Calvin could accept. I can go back to the conscious other and my yearning for it during my boyhood in New Hampshire, north of Hanover, where Pinneo Hill rises up off Lyme Road (or the Lyme Road, as old-timers called it, making it more definite and descriptive and less of a name). When I would go up into the pasture, where there was a clearing with a fine birch grove in the middle and an outcropping left by the big glacier...

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...rtant: a football game being of greater import than a polliwog, for example (in New Hampshire they were polliwogs, making me always feel that tadpole was a bookish term). What saved me and kept me young in an almost literal sense, some would say childish or, more positively, childlike, was the expanse of woods and pasture, brook and fields. I also had the companionship of two remarkable dogs. I suppose that all dogs, like people, must be remarkable to those who know them well.

of capitalism.

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