Is a translation "the real thing"? Poetry versus prose.

[Eric]

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 archaïc 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.

[ions]

I've been following along via Paul Verhaeghen's blog and have to side with Paul. He ended one of his latest entries with this:

As a nasty footnote: To me, it seems that monolinguals (and monolingual cultures) have a much harder time accepting translations for what they are: approximations of what an author was doing, in her own historical time and place, which is anyway an approximation of what said author /wanted/ to do in said historical/spatial circumstances, than multilinguals (and multilingual cultures) do. This, methinks, is not unlike the type of paranoia often exhibited by the deaf – there’s a joke being played on them, continuously, behind their back, they feel, and life would be so much better if only they could put their finger on it! (“There’s something happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Green?”)

And again I agree. To "dismiss" translations is one of those arguments that are valid in premise but not worth making.

One of Paul's Blog Posts on the Topic

[Eric]

I haven't really been following Paul Verhaeghen and his blog, as the thought of reading his large book seems a little overpowering.

But he is perfectly right about monolinguals. There is a kind of underlying envy that monolinguals harbour. They are jealous of the fact that some individuals and cultures know more languages than just the one. But they are too bloody idle to learn even one foreign language. So they try to dismiss anything to do with other languages as irrelevant. You come across that snooty attitude a lot in Britain, because there no one actually needs any other language to live their everyday lives. Whereas no academic in Europe can survive internationally without knowing English, German or French to a level where they can read a paper at a seminar in it, and reply to questions.

Verhaeghen, of course, comes from a culture that is very much bilingual - Dutch & French. Neither the Dutch nor the French spoken in Belgium are 100% like the respective languages spoken in the Netherlands and France. This adds yet another dimension. And Verhaeghen has learnt a third language which he is so good at that he could translate his own novel into English.

How many English-speaking novelists over the past 50 years could translate their works into anything (barring Samuel Beckett, who was good at French)? How many could even translate other people's works into English?

Brits don't need to learn loads of languages, just to show off to their mates in the pub. One foreign language will do; it will give valuable insights into both the grammatical and the social side of languages.