Q&A with Adam Bremer-McCollum
Adam Bremer-McCollum, Research Associate, Texts and Translations of Transcendence and Transformation, is spearheading an open-access book series translating ancient texts on the transcendent and transformative. This abridged interview is featured in Theosis.
What do you most enjoy about translating texts?
I mean, I love grammar and lexicon as much as the next person, but it’s really about the literature in all sorts of ways: formal and informal, verse and prose, all of it. What are the texts like and how do we get to experience them?
How are you bringing this sense of experience into the project?
One way that I’m trying to do this in my own translations—and we have encouraged other people to do this as well—is to be a little bit experimental in the translation. Anyone who’s studied any so-called “ancient language” knows that with a lot of translations—and also with the grammars where students and scholars are taught to understand these languages—there’s a real deadness to the English. You’re taught that this word means these three things. And for better or worse, students hang on to those three things and just translate that way, and this carries over into scholarship, too. There are so many translations into English that make a really exciting text kind of dull.
If you compare how translators translate, say, a modern book published in the past 25 years, you know, from French or Spanish or German or Russian into English, there’s a lot more freedom that translators are exercising compared to a lot of translators for ancient language texts. Hopefully, this will be a playground, an open arena to a certain extent, for translators to stretch things a little.
And how do you hope readers will experience these texts?
One sort of guiding tenet of the series is that language is fun and interesting. It’s a little bit boring if we just look at the world and think about it with one script, with one language, with one particular phonology. The world, of course, is a rich place in all manner of ways and languages is just one of those. And so, these texts, hopefully visually, conceptually, in all sorts of ways, will honor that idea.
I hope the texts and translations will present opportunities for people who can read them out loud, not just on the page or screen. We want these texts to be experienced, not just in a normal two-dimensional way, but with as much of the body as possible.