Mark Polizzotti – författare

Bob Dylans skiva, HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED, är en av hans mest betydelsefulla. Denna bok handlar om skivan, som gavs ut 1965. Där finns klassiska låtar som Lika A Rolling Stone och den nionde och avslutande låten Desolation Row. Där förvandlas den amerikanska drömmen, i tio verser, till en mardröm. En mardröm dit Highway 61 Revisited leder. Detta är första pocketboken i musikserien 33 1/3.

Highway 61 är vid sidan av Route 66 den mest legendariska vägen i USA och den sträcker sig från Kanadas gräns i norr ner till Mexikanska golfen i söder. Vägen passerar platser där Elvis Presley och Muddy Waters föddes. Och Dylans uppväxt- och gruvstad Hibbing ligger strax intill.

Många har haft åsikter om Bob Dylans låtkatalog. Så bestämde sig Svenska Akademien för att tilldela honom Nobelpriset 2016. Deras motivering löd: "Nobelpriset i litteratur 2016 tilldelas Bob Dylan som skapat nya poetiska uttryck inom den stora amerikanska sångtraditionen."

An engaging and unabashedly opinionated examination of what translation is and isn''t.

For some, translation is the poor cousin of literature, a necessary evil if not an outright travesty—summed up by the old Italian play on words, traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor). For others, translation is the royal road to cross-cultural understanding and literary enrichment. In this nuanced and provocative study, Mark Polizzotti attempts to reframe the debate along more fruitful lines. Eschewing both these easy polarities and the increasingly abstract discourse of translation theory, he brings the main questions into clearer focus: What is the ultimate goal of a translation? What does it mean to label a rendering “faithful”? (Faithful to what?) Is something inevitably lost in translation, and can something also be gained? Does translation matter, and if so, why? Unashamedly opinionated, both a manual and a manifesto, his book invites usto sympathize with the translator not as a “traitor” but as the author''s creative partner.

Polizzotti, himself a translator of authors from Patrick Modiano to Gustave Flaubert, explores what translation is and what it isn''t, and how it does or doesn''t work. Translation, he writes, “skirts the boundaries between art and craft, originality and replication, altruism and commerce, genius and hack work.” In Sympathy for the Traitor, he shows us how to read not only translations but also the act of translation itself, treating it not as a problem to be solved but as an achievement to be celebrated—something, as Goethe put it, “impossible, necessary, and important.”