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Jan Steyn

@jsteyn.bsky.social
179 followers 298 following 35 posts

Literary Translator | World Lit Scholar | Longdog Lover | Supporter of Losing Cricket Teams

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Jan Steyn @jsteyn.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
Do you know who should be the next Translator in Residence at the U of Iowa? Tell them to apply!
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Jan Steyn @jsteyn.bsky.social · 22/12/2024
So it turns out China Miéville’s latest was co-authored by some guy called Keanu Reeves. Kinda fun. Best enjoyed after a grading marathon in front of your father in law’s wood stove.
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Jan Steyn @jsteyn.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
Reading: The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin. Vibe: “Morning came in a thousand thousand minute gradations of blue-white upon blue-white.” Genre play: clever. Beautiful sentences: many. Body count: high. Reminds me of: The Red Dog by Willem Anker, trans. Michiel Heyns.
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Jan Steyn @jsteyn.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
A hound watching the hound group. Game recognizes game.
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Jan Steyn @jsteyn.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
Legs, too, is gripped by the dog show. But not the toy breeds…
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Jan Steyn @jsteyn.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
Breyten Breytenbach (1939-2024). My first love in poetry. The first writer who compelled me to translate (so that my English-speaking high school friends could understand). A brilliant, fearless unicum of a man.
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Jan Steyn @jsteyn.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
Thursday Reading: The PEN 1969 Manifesto on Translation. The vibe: “Their names are usually forgotten, they are grotesquely underpaid, and their services, however skillfully rendered, are regarded with the slightly patronizing and pitying respect formerly reserved for junior housemaids.”
An image of literary translators as “junior housemaids”
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Jan Steyn @jsteyn.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
Thursday reading: Fiston Mujila’s Tram 83, trans. Roland Glasser. The vibe: “There are cities which don’t need literature: they are literature. They file past, chest thrust out, head on their shoulders. […] The City-State, an example among so many others — she pulsated with literature.”
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Jan Steyn @jsteyn.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Tuesday’s rereading (for teaching): China Miéville’s The City & The City. The vibe: “ We had stolen gudcop and badcop from English, verbed them.”
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Jan Steyn @jsteyn.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
Sunday reading: Jen Calleja’s Goblinhood. The vibe: “AI is a goblin that wants to convince you that you can’t write […]; that you can’t write properly […]; and that you can’t learn a language …[and] foreign languages are just a terrible inconvenience and not linked to a culture or people”
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Jan Steyn @jsteyn.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
This nonsense from a new Grammarly guide encouraging businesses to buy their AI products. Yet again translation gets smeared as the opposite of creative (and, oddly, strategic) ways to spend your time…
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