Virtual Memories Show 620:
Damion Searls
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“The thing about translation in our culture is that people have this skewed idea because they’re thinking of their French 1 or Greek 1 class.”
Translator & author Damion Searls kicks off our 2025 season with a talk about his amazing new book, THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRANSLATION (Yale University Press). We talk about how all writing — translation or not — involves constraints, he balanced the book between philosophical argument and concrete examples of translation, and how he came to define translation as “reading one thing and writing something else.” We also get into where all the languages — German, Dutch, Norwegian, French — started for him (+ his lockdown project of teaching himself modern Greek), how the business of translation has changed during his career and the problems with the English market’s dominance, how a ‘book report’ led to him becoming the translator of Nobel-winner Jon Fosse, how he edited an abridged version of Thoreau’s (7000 pages of) journals, and why he only put one negative example in The Philosophy of Translation. Plus we discuss how he doesn’t look over his own translators’ shoulders, why he resents critics’ bias against translation and the notion of “a ‘faithful’ translation” or “getting it right,” the fetish Great Books programs have for The Original Text, how he & his peers fought for royalties over fee-for-service and the days when translators treated like typesetters, and plenty more. Give it a listen! And go read The Philosophy of Translation!
“I’m not here to make people eat their vegetables. I just think these books are good, I want to read them, and it’s rewarding to me to give people access to them.”
“The strength I have is that I read well in the other language and I write well in English.”
“Not being objective doesn’t mean something is subjective.”
“There’s no better way to teach Plato than to teach five different translations of a passage.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
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About our Guest
Damion Searls studied philosophy at Harvard and is a prominent translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, including of books by Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Rilke, Proust, Victoria Kielland, Saša Staniši?, Jelinek, Mann, Modiano, and Jon Fosse. His own writing includes fiction, poetry, and a widely translated biography of the creator of the Rorschach test.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at an undisclosed location on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Damion solo by Beowulf Sheehan; photo of us together by me. It’s on my instagram.