Skyping with Nina Scott

I thought that our conversation with Nina Scott this morning was very interesting and informational. I really enjoyed how she took the time to actaualy go through our questions one by one, and how her responses were very clear in informing us what we had asked. I had imagined that Nina Scott had translated other novels/poems, but I was surprised to find out that she felt as if the poems were much harder to translate. I thought that because a novel was much longer than a poem, and had many more symbols/allusions/plot, that a novel would be harder to translate. I also liked how Nina Scott was not embarrassed to say that her original translated version of Sab was not very good. Many other translators would not share that information, but as Nina explained, through her errors she was able to revise the original translation and make it into what her translated version of Sab is today. I do believe that Nina made a good decision to translate Sab into the 19th century English. If she would have written it in contemporary English, I feel like some of Avellaneda's original work would have been changed, and therefore the novel would have lost some of its time meaning to me. When I first bought the novel Sab, I looked at the picture on the front cover for quite some time, trying to understand and predict what the novel was about based on the book. Just now did I realize that I was looking it too superficially. I loved how Nina Scott explained how and why she chose this picture to be the cover of the text. This picture has true depth to it, with symbolism, and really what Sab says throughout the novel. At the start, this was just like any ordinary picture of a slave I had seen, but now I understand that it truly characterizes the character of Sab. Like he said in the novel, Sab is just a mulatto and a slave, which is exactly what the picture is portraying. In other words, I feel that all my questions of Sab were answered, and it was pretty cool to talk with the translator of Sab.