Eric
31-Aug-2008, 13:02
To quote Chad Post from the Three Percent website in an article called "How to Dismiss Translations":
My belief is that you simply have to treat the book as it is. A translation isn’t the same as the original, and can be/should be evaluated on its own terms. If a sentence is poorly written, or a chapter overly muddy, it’s a moot point to debate if this was the fault of the translator or author. It’s part of the book as it exists in translation and can be criticized as such.
You can only find out whether something was poorly written, as suggested here, by comparing the original with the translation. That should be the job of the critic. But Chad's point about treating a book as it is, is valid. You wouldn't even have access to the book without the translation, however flawed it may be.
Poetry is certainly a lot harder to translate successfully than prose, especially it it's got built in rhyme, rhythm, et., (as in those points Hofstadter made on another thread). But we would know nothing about Goethe, Baudelaire, Lorca, Mandelstam, etc., without translation.
And there's a continuum between poetry and prose. Prose can be "poetic", but in different ways. An author like Virginia Woolf can use words and images in unusual ways, jump from scene to scene, and so on. The impression she makes is one of poetry. But there is no rhyme scheme to adhere to, no alliteration to imitate. If you open The Waves at random, Woolf rarely uses highfalutin words. Occasionally, for effect, but mostly her vocabulary is straightforward. Her syntax, however, can be archa?c or convoluted. But that is surely easier for the translator to reproduce that the tight rhythm & rhyme scheme of many poets.
I think the whole argument about whether a translation is the real thing gets too tangled up with the difficulties. The Bible is a huge translation of both prose and poetry, and many attempts have been made in many languages to render it for a particular age. But Bible translators don't give up. The book is retranslated every few decades.
The West has built a whole religion, Christianity, up on translation, and the interpretation of the Bible. We can't just dismiss translation as "not being the original", otherwise we consign two thousand years of the pillar of European religion, hence culture, to the dustbin.
My belief is that you simply have to treat the book as it is. A translation isn’t the same as the original, and can be/should be evaluated on its own terms. If a sentence is poorly written, or a chapter overly muddy, it’s a moot point to debate if this was the fault of the translator or author. It’s part of the book as it exists in translation and can be criticized as such.
You can only find out whether something was poorly written, as suggested here, by comparing the original with the translation. That should be the job of the critic. But Chad's point about treating a book as it is, is valid. You wouldn't even have access to the book without the translation, however flawed it may be.
Poetry is certainly a lot harder to translate successfully than prose, especially it it's got built in rhyme, rhythm, et., (as in those points Hofstadter made on another thread). But we would know nothing about Goethe, Baudelaire, Lorca, Mandelstam, etc., without translation.
And there's a continuum between poetry and prose. Prose can be "poetic", but in different ways. An author like Virginia Woolf can use words and images in unusual ways, jump from scene to scene, and so on. The impression she makes is one of poetry. But there is no rhyme scheme to adhere to, no alliteration to imitate. If you open The Waves at random, Woolf rarely uses highfalutin words. Occasionally, for effect, but mostly her vocabulary is straightforward. Her syntax, however, can be archa?c or convoluted. But that is surely easier for the translator to reproduce that the tight rhythm & rhyme scheme of many poets.
I think the whole argument about whether a translation is the real thing gets too tangled up with the difficulties. The Bible is a huge translation of both prose and poetry, and many attempts have been made in many languages to render it for a particular age. But Bible translators don't give up. The book is retranslated every few decades.
The West has built a whole religion, Christianity, up on translation, and the interpretation of the Bible. We can't just dismiss translation as "not being the original", otherwise we consign two thousand years of the pillar of European religion, hence culture, to the dustbin.