Re: translating
citycabn (citycabn@gateway.net)
Mon, 18 Oct 1999 10:51:04 -0700
Will,
I enjoyed your post.
A couple of quibbles:
I think I am distinguishing between readers who read the writer as the
writer wrote it, as opposed to the readers who have someone sitting in front
of them partially blocking the view of the entire field in Yankee Stadium.
(One of my thrills as a mere lad was taking the train into NY and seeing
noneotherthan No. 7 in center field.) Meaning, don't take *my* word for
what RMR wrote, meant, really means. When his name comes out of my mouth
warning signals should go off and the fish reading the post should know the
not-undersigned don't know German.
Personally, I am in tremendous debt to translators. For RMR, for Kafka.
And others... We need to distinguish between outright hoots of
translations, real honest-to-goodness approximations of the Original, and
*adaptations* which all too frequently aren't identified as such. Dear,
dear old Robert Lowell, fellow sufferer of manic depression, really got that
last one rolling along with *his* forays into all of world poetry. Pound
didn't help either.
As for the trump card: part of me is nodding yes, and part of me is
wishing it were true. FOR THE WRITER, emotion, experience with*out*
being cast into language is not the same as emotion, experience passing
through language. Or: Silence into language into transformed silence. I
leave it at that. Got to go and gaze at trees.
-----Original Message-----
From: William Hochman <wh14@is9.nyu.edu>
To: bananafish@lists.nyu.edu <bananafish@lists.nyu.edu>
Date: Saturday, October 16, 1999 7:06 AM
Subject: translating
>I wanted to ask the tranlasting thinkers here if they could explain
>Salinger's success with being translated into Japanese and German?
>
>I like Robert Bly's _8 Stages of Translation_ because he thinks
>translating is art-making and suggests poets do the translating work by
>being poets first and language mavens next.
>
>In some ways, I want to lay down an imaginary trump card here and suggest
>all literature is translation...the non-language of emotion to language,
>from experience to language, from language to language, we are always
>translating...
>
>I've read too many poets (including our dear Rilke) in translation and
>love their work (Bly's translation of Neruda and Vallejo opened the door
>for me to love Machado, Jiminez, Parra, Lorca and others) too much to keep
>the door closed. I do agree that preference fcr versions or techniques of
>translating make some better than others, I'm just trying to sit on the
>sidelines and root for translation in general.
>
>will
>
>