My essay “Tuning In: On Retranslating Quotations” just appeared in a cool special issue of California Italian Studies, edited by Lucia Re and Anna Botta. The issue is called Calvino’s Memos: Between the Old and the New Millennium. My topic is quite a niche one but I haven’t seen it treated elsewhere. Here’s the abstract:

This essay draws on the author’s personal experiences in translating two quotation-heavy volumes, Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium and Roberto Calasso’s K., in order to raise and examine theoretical questions about context, intertextuality, and retranslation. Brock asks why a translator might choose to retranslate quoted passages that already exist in other translations and demonstrates that new contexts can justify retranslation.