For Lauren Hynde~ "Tudo quanto"

[bogusbrig]

Tell him to stuff it and be glad he's being published.

I'll tell them to stuff it and if they have anything to say about that, I'll tell them Angeline is stood right behind me!

 

[Angeline]

I'll tell them to stuff it and if they have anything to say about that, I'll tell them Angeline is stood right behind me!

Good. I'm sure my threatening presence will be immensely helpful.

 

[bogusbrig]

Good. I'm sure my threatening presence will be immensely helpful.

On a serious note. I have to admit, I am starting to realise how being trapped in a small language can limit ones art. My other half (who is Dutch) has told me this for years but I've never taken the idea seriously. I don't mean it limits you as a human being of course but style and ones exposure to new ideas, even in this day and age of mass communication.

 

[Angeline]

On a serious note. I have to admit, I am starting to realise how being trapped in a small language can limit ones art. My other half (who is Dutch) has told me this for years but I've never taken the idea seriously. I don't mean it limits you as a human being of course but style and ones exposure to new ideas, even in this day and age of mass communication.

Yes, but don't you think that's true to some extent in every language? That the idioms of one's native language drive--and limit in some ways--communication across cultures? My understanding of worlds beyond my own is limited by my expectations about--well all sorts of things--because of my socialization in my own culture. The language I grew up with makes me see the world in a certain way. Of course there are universals. How else would one explain the worldwide appeal of a Shakespeare or Basho or Neruda?

I have long been fascinated with cultural differences that seem to be expressed in poetic styles--or maybe cultural voice is a better way to put it. Maybe it's a chicken and egg type argument. Did art create and further the culture or vice versa? But I imagine translators have a special understanding about this because they try to breach the differences.

I used to pick Lauren's brain about this idea because she is fluent in many languages. I wonder what she or Liar or others who are bi- or more-lingual think about this.

On the other hand, maybe I should just go back in the kitchen and finish making dinner.

 

[Lauren Hynde]

Of course there are universals. How else would one explain the worldwide appeal of a Shakespeare or Basho or Neruda?

Simplicity.

 

[Angeline]

Simplicity.

And I thought you were gonna chide me for outting your bi-ness--well multi-ness.

 

[Lauren Hynde]

 

[bogusbrig]

Yes, but don't you think that's true to some extent in every language?

Oh without a doubt you are right, language and socialization are limiting and in many ways draw boundaries around us. I was just thinking that having such an international language as a mother tongue does allow one to expand those boundaries somewhat and exchange ideas that are not there for someone whose mother tongue is limited to the frontiers of their country.

The Dutch have words that fall between English words and words English doesn't have which is fascinating, especially since the root of English comes from the north Dutch and German coast.

On the other hand, maybe I should just go back in the kitchen and finish making dinner.

Yes. A woman should know her place. You have shown far too much intelligence for one night!

 

[flyguy69]

And I thought you were gonna chide me for outting your bi-ness--well multi-ness.

No wonder she elicits a multitude of reactions!

 

[Tzara]

Translation is its own art. Unfortunately, it is an art that by its nature is condemned to failure.

I have been fascinated by the problems of translation for several years. One of my particular interests is work by Scandinavian authors, particularly the Nobel Prize winning novelist Knut Hamsun, and I try to purchase as many different translations as I can of a work I want to read. Hamsun's four great novels from the 1890s have each been translated three times into English, and I have copies of each translation, as well as the Norwegian original for most of them.

It just adds to the confusion and frustration, though, I think.

Even with my almost completely nonfunctional Norwegian skills, I can see that

I de siste dager har jeg tænkt og tænkt på Nordlandssommerens evige dag, doesn't precisely match any of these translations:

• These last few days I have been thinking and thinking of the Nordland summer, with its endless day. (Translated by W. W. Worster, 1921)
• These last few days I have thought and thought of the Nordland summer's endless day. (Translated by James W. MacFarlane, 1956)
• I've thought and thought, these last few days, about the endless day of the Nordland summer. (Translated by Sverre Lyngstad, 1998)

Yes, all three pretty much render the literal meaning of the sentence, but how they render it is very different. To my phonetic ear, the Hamsun original has a particular and lovely lilt to it that is best (though imperfectly) rendered by the MacFarlane translation. And that's what's available for a novel, not a poem! (Hamsun's Pan. Read it, by the way. It is a fabulous book.)

How very much more difficult it is to translate a poem, where the precise choice of word and sense and sound and meter is even more critical!

Indulge me here by letting me talk about another example, where I have slightly better though still woefully deficient language skills. The first line of Albert Camus' L'étranger (The Stranger or The Outsider):

Aujourd'hui, maman est morte.​

The classic Stuart Gilbert translation renders this as Mother died today. Joseph Laredo (who renders the title in English as The Outsider) translates the sentence this way as well. Matthew Ward, on the other hand, points out that both Camus (in his notebooks) and Sartre (in his commentary) remark upon the use of the word maman, which is a child's form of referring to mother--something like "mama" or "mommy" or "mummy" in English. He translates this sentence as Maman died today.

To my mind, kind of a cop out, but understandable. Here, I happen to like Mother died today, which emphasizes the distracted distance the narrator feels towards humanity, but it also detracts from the childlike relationship he holds towards his mother.

How do you do that in English? Mama died today? Mommy died today? You start getting into connotations that are perhaps not what Camus had in mind.

So my conclusion would be that you really can't translate literature--any literature, but probably particularly poetry. Does that mean no one should try? Of course not!

You render it as best you can. And a quality translator can get you quite a long ways there, despite the difficulties. My hat is off to Gilbert Adair, for example, whose translation of Georges Perec's La disparition manages to translate a 300 page French avant-garde novel that does not contain a single "e" into an English equivalent that also does not contain the letter "e" (A void, Harvill, 1994).

In some ways, that has to be harder than Perec's original accomplishment.

 

[Fast1]

Who cares?
Fuckin' Dante... poetry-writing faggot! Piece of shit, motherfucker!

Di quel che udire e che parlar vi piace,
noi udiremo e parleremo a voi,
mentre che 'l vento, come fa, ci tace.
-Dante

 

[bogusbrig]

So my conclusion would be that you really can't translate literature--any literature, but probably particularly poetry. Does that mean no one should try? Of course not!

You render it as best you can. And a quality translator can get you quite a long ways there, despite the difficulties. My hat is off to Gilbert Adair, for example, whose translation of Georges Perec's La disparition manages to translate a 300 page French avant-garde novel that does not contain a single "e" into an English equivalent that also does not contain the letter "e" (A void, Harvill, 1994).

In some ways, that has to be harder than Perec's original accomplishment.

I think when one starts really thinking about the problems of translation you also start to understand how limited ones own language is. I've been discussing this with my other half or more accurately, she has been lecturing me on my simplistic view of translation (though I think this has more to do with her frustraion of the task I have set her). She isn't just translating poetry which she says is impossible, she says you don't translate poetry, you rewrite it in another language, she also is trying to please writers who believe they speak good English but she insists have too high an opinion of their own capabilities (reluctantly I have to agree with her on this)

It's often been said in these threads that poetry is about clarity of language but I would beg to differ. Poetry plays on the ambiguity of language to render meaning that falls between words in prose which presents the problem, how do you translate an ambiguity in a language that doesn't exist in another. This is just one example of a multitude I've been lectured on this last week.

 

[Tzara]

I think when one starts really thinking about the problems of translation you also start to understand how limited ones own language is. I've been discussing this with my other half or more accurately, she has been lecturing me on my simplistic view of translation (though I think this has more to do with her frustraion of the task I have set her). She isn't just translating poetry which she says is impossible, she says you don't translate poetry, you rewrite it in another language, she also is trying to please writers who believe they speak good English but she insists have too high an opinion of their own capabilities (reluctantly I have to agree with her on this)

It's often been said in these threads that poetry is about clarity of language but I would beg to differ. Poetry plays on the ambiguity of language to render meaning that falls between words in prose which presents the problem, how do you translate an ambiguity in a language that doesn't exist in another. This is just one example of a multitude I've been lectured on this last week.

Tiina Nunnally, who did the English translation of Peter Høeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow, tells an interesting story about dealing with him while translating the book. In the original Danish, Høeg apparently uses an idiomatic phrase that I remember her saying was something like "he had a duck on his back." She changed this to something else ("monkey on his back" I think) and he was upset about this. She tried to explain that a literal translation of the phrase would sound silly in English, but he wouldn't listen.

When the book went to publication in the UK, he had several changes made to her translation, including changing the title to Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (which is a more literal translation of the Danish Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne). She disagreed with the changes and had them take her name off of the UK edition.

She also said that translation is like recreating or rewriting the book in the other language, and that the best translators are people who are good writers.

 

[bogusbrig]

She also said that translation is like recreating or rewriting the book in the other language, and that the best translators are people who are good writers.

My other half said she's a prose writer not a poet and I really need a poet to translate poems.

However, she soldiers on in her own firey way.