The Genius of Translation - Tablet Magazine

Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody’s translations of Benjamin Fondane, the Romanian francophone poet-philosopher increasingly recognized as a vital, enduring figure of Jewish and world literature, and of Paul Valéry, a writer as significant to French letters as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are to the anglophone world, but whose dense, compact, intricate verse is far more formally demanding than theirs (imagine John Donne or George Herbert in the age of Fernando Pessoa), have been justly praised. He is, as well, a talented poet. It is a fact of modern letters that even translators working on such relatively familiar languages as French (which, time was, anyone who had done a little college would at least pretend to know) are rarely evaluated with any degree of seriousness. It’s not merely that people praise translations without comparing them against the original; this wouldn’t be so bad, if people asked themselves honestly whether they were enjoying what they were reading in English. Too often, how

Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody’s translations of Benjamin Fondane, the Romanian francophone poet-philosopher increasingly recognized as a vital, enduring figure of Jewish and world literature, and of Paul Valéry, a writer as significant to French letters as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are to the anglophone world, but whose dense, compact, intricate verse is far more formally demanding than theirs (imagine John Donne or George Herbert in the age of Fernando Pessoa), have been justly praised. He is, as well, a talented poet. It is a fact of modern letters that even translators working on such relatively