tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post8485692333133115166..comments2024-01-05T11:16:11.081+00:00Comments on Russian Dinosaur: A translator's tale, Part TwoRussian Dinosaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15708798725927250672noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-59549598610579628422014-12-30T19:09:03.664+00:002014-12-30T19:09:03.664+00:00Translating may be about conveying as best we can ...Translating may be about conveying as best we can an author's style — what we see — before his perceived intention — what we infer. Whatever the style weaknesses you might resent, aren't they the author's strength in the end, else why bother translating him? How would you convey "a rose is a rose is a rose" in russian, while avoiding sounding repetitious? Or Albert Cohen's novel Belle de Jour (in whatever language you choose) while adding grammatically correct commas and periods where he purposedly skipped them page upon page, leaving the reader breathless, stoned, to convey a character's confused inner voice? I'll dare further: can one bypass Russians' use and abuse of verbless sentences, where rose — a rose — a rose — and not lose the rhythm of russian speech and writing, sometimes smoothly iambic but so often ragtime? And you are lucky being British, while transposing iambs to French alexandrines is hopeless.<br />Finally, may one discuss Lev Tolstoi's grammatical litteracy without a deep (i.e. modest) knowledge of the roots and evolution of russian, bielorussian, ukrainian — and french! — grammars? Should the translator correct all the barbarisms spotted in the french dialogs in War and Peace or leave them as they are, complete with the footnotes, trusting Tolstoi's hindsight of what he perceived as the way uppity Russians abused French in 1812, and enjoying his own mistakes as part of history? Back to A. Cohen, should we love our woman with her fat and wart or get it doctored away?<br />"Traduttore, traditore" is not an excuse: just as in music or theater, shouldn't the translator remember he is only the interpreter, never the co-author? All in all, we're only literature gentlemen's gentlemen. There may be nobility enough in this humble task if you remember your position: under the rock, rolling it upwards again and again.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17082059270168883226noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-43823464807103132902013-04-16T03:59:43.961+01:002013-04-16T03:59:43.961+01:00Make that ont droit and ont tort, of course. Post...Make that <i>ont droit</i> and <i>ont tort</i>, of course. Post in haste....John Cowanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11452247999156925669noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3743216407449778066.post-75274484353658467572013-04-15T07:28:07.743+01:002013-04-15T07:28:07.743+01:00It seems to me that there is no principled distinc...It seems to me that there is no principled distinction to be made between your first and your second points, between the aesthetic and the technical errors or corrections as the case may be. I could easily construct an argument to assign your examples to the opposite rubrics.<br /><br />For example, it's generally agreed that "le style, c'est l'homme même", and who is any translator to clean up an author's style and thereby whitewash his character? If Chayanov wrote crudely, ought not we anglophones to experience that crudeness as russophones do? Otherwise we are not reading Chayanov at all. <br /><br />Per contra, if Perov is an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb about electrical terminology, is it meet, think you, that we also, look you, should be an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb about it also? Presumably Chayanov <i>meant</i> to write in his own style; did Perov <i>mean</i> to get his terminology wrong? Surely not; if he was indifferent to it, it was out of ignorance.<br /><br />In particular, correctness has an aesthetic value of its own. If an author begins his story with "The spaceship came screeching and shuddering to a halt fifty thousand miles off Venus", I throw his story into the trash can, because I know that if the following words are not actually "panting and lathered", they might as well be. His story is simply not science fiction, and wouldn't have been even in 1924: it's a horse opera transplanted to space (which is not the same as "space opera" at all).<br /><br />But I don't mean to imply that my views <i>son droit</i> and yours <i>son tort</i>, just that it's hopeless to draw any sort of principled line between what is ugly and should be fixed, and what is intended and should be left alone. It's all very well for the translator to say that the story must be true to the facts of our time and not done up in the preposterous fashion of Boyan, but must we have Homer done into the language of chiefs and medicine men, or (the other way about) Huckleberry Finn's voice drowned in a butt of Classical French alexandrines? Surely not, in either case.John Cowanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11452247999156925669noreply@blogger.com