Happy New Year and paintings about translation

Just back from a lovely Christmas with my family (in Texas, for a change). I had the pleasure of seeing the Caravaggio exhibition at the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth and thought it would make a nice note to end the year on.

One of the fascinating features of this exhibition was the inclusion of paintings by followers of Caravaggio.The exhibition is structured in themed 'rooms', one of which is dedicated to St. Jerome. It turns out that Caravaggio's imitators have quite a different vision of Jerome to the one I was used to. Earlier paintings by Jan van Eyck, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Antonello da Messina portray him in elaborate interiors with big libraries and lots of kit. He also tends to be rather formally dressed for someone who works from home. The paintings after Caravaggio portray a rather different translation context. It's night, not day. Jerome hasn't bothered to finish dressing. He might or might not be sitting at a desk. Lions don't feature as prominently.

Of the four St. Jerome paintings in the exhibition, my favourites were Bartolomeo Cavarozzi's 'St. Jerome in his Study with Two Angels' (c.1617) of which I couldn't find a convincing image online, and Jusepe de Ribera's weatherbeaten, great-outdoorsy St. Jerome of c.1613:

There is also Trophime Bigot's 'Saint Jerome Reading', aka 'Saint Jerome and the Itty-Bitty Book Light'.

I very much like the painting below by Leonello Spada from the Galleria Nazionale in Rome, not in the exhibition but in the same tradition. The bare feet...The eyeglasses...The sitting with the laptop sorry manuscript in his lap...The candle burned down to the socket...:

For anyone in hailing distance of Fort Worth, the exhibition runs another week until 8 January. To all readers of this blog, a very happy New Year and best wishes from Southsea.

interpreting in the financial spotlight

I see another easy news story about the terrible expense of public service translating and interpreting ('Cash-strapped force defends up to £68-an-hour translators'). A funny one for several reasons:
(a) they are talking as usual about interpreting rather than translation;
(b) reading down, one learns that the regular rate is less than half the headline rate, and that the headline rate is for anti-social hours (freelancers need sleep too, and the occasional day off);
(c) I have just seen an advertisement for some occasional interpreting work that paid £9 an hour, which rather dents the image of plutocratic linguists living off the fat of the land. (I also, fwiw, recently came across an ad for an interpreting gig that pays $200,000+ a year, but that one involved Dari and Pashto and being shot at, so I'm going to say that one doesn't count).

It's good at least to hear the other side of the story from the police and in the form of a spirited comment by Pamela Mayorcas of the ITI. Not everyone may agree, but we live in a multilingual society where basic legal, medical and administrative access entitlements mean that we will continue to need interpreters and translators, just as we continue to need lawyers, police, plumbing, wifi signals, ramps, tea, coffee, water, telephones, oxygen etc. It's easy and seductive to fantasise about everyone learning English, particularly in these straitened times when everyone is looking for budget headings to cut; but any day any one of us could be mugged in Rome or accidentally rear-end someone in Estonia, and then we would be very, very grateful indeed to find that the police speak our language.

light relief

Hi all,

It's late in the term, everyone's cold, tired and damp, so here are some snippets about translation and interpreting which should entertain as well as providing food for thought. (Apocryphal, schmocryphal!)

Carol