An adage famously ascribed to the mythologist Joseph Campbell says that we desire not so much the meaning of life as the feeling of being alive. But that is a false dichotomy based on the generalization that we are feeling rather than thinking beings. The truth is that we are both thinkers and feelers—that is our human paradox, the price paid for an awareness of our condition. If we stopped for a...
It is a sad day when a person gains enough insight and understanding to situate every individual on a much longer timeline. People’s ambitions evanesce in a puff of smoke. Self-importance begins to seem like sadism. Even presidents and world leaders shrink to the dimensions of a tiny photo with captions in the textbooks of a distant, unseen century. At the same time, egotism becomes grotesque and...
Upon reaching a certain stage of life, usually after the age of 30 but always when enough time has elapsed to make you wonder about the slowly accumulating rubbish heap of your past, regrets come up as an infallible sign that you are getting older. You start to hem and haw. You lament the paths not taken, gnash your teeth, gaze in the mirror for longer intervals at the sunken and lifeless lumps...
If there is a collective stupidity in the modern world, a tragicomedy peculiar to developed countries and played out ad nauseam in the media and popular culture, it is that of our perception of the human lifespan, which is just long enough for people to kid themselves about its laughable brevity. We are like high-wire performers enslaved by our sense of balance, enraptured by the feat and so...
A person’s individuality is like an unfinished puzzle. But while some people have pieces aplenty and have managed to place them into a coherent order that has all the makings of an actual picture, others have only a few pieces scattered around or none at all—or what’s worse, the wrong ones altogether.
Writing is an apparently simple act. The person doing the writing puts words in order, one after another, line by line, adding squiggles and dots here and there to make the appropriate pauses before concluding with a mighty flourish: I am a writer, says the person who has written. And that is correct by definition. But in our topsy-turvy zeitgeist, the writing on the wall is that artificial...
Although many on the Internet might doubt the vigor and even the courage of the average keyboard warrior, that little amoeba squirming in the dark, I have no doubt that these are only warriors according to their own tattered and abused definition. Upon a bit of consideration and not a little charity of thought, anyone would realize that these are just warriors of the mind, a battlefield where the...
Q: What is transcreation? A: Transcreation as a word combines two different words: translation and creation. But the word creation as such is something of a misnomer; transcreation can be more readily understood as a combination of copywriting and translation, amounting to a kind of creative adaptation of a text for a culturally specific target audience that speaks a different language from that...
The idea that translation is an art rests on two fundamental premises. The first is that effective translation requires a certain amount of skill, its techniques and methods developed over time not only in the hurly-burly of solitary practice or paid translation projects but also under the guidance of a more experienced professional. This explanation would elevate translation into a craft...
There are many things to love about the Spanish language. For instance, it has a wonderful cadence undergirded by its many vowels and a speed unmatched by that of almost any other language. And while this can present a steeper learning curve for students of Spanish, who often find themselves pelted by the heavy machine-gun fire of natives in a normal, everyday conversation, it is completely...