So begins "The Republic of Translation/Two new translations of poetry travel from ancient Sardinia to modern Paris" by Anahid Nersessian in The New York Review of Books.
The utopian socialist sounds like a beatnik.
Nice cover:
July 7, 2023
"'There is a big secret about sex,' wrote Leo Bersani in 1987. 'Most people don’t like it.' The same might be said of translation..."
"... which many readers secretly consider a necessary evil. Even the very best produces a lingering frustration, an irritable awareness that we didn’t get what we came for. If translation is like sex, it often leaves us with a case of epididymal hypertension, or, in the vernacular, blue balls.
One of the worst things about a bad translation is that it’s unforgettable. The Pre-Raphaelite artist, designer, and utopian socialist William Morris took a run at Homer in 1887 and hit the wall hard. 'Tell me, O Muse, of the Shifty,” his translation of the Odyssey begins, “the man who wandered afar,/After the Holy Burg, Troy-town, he had wasted with war.'"
So begins "The Republic of Translation/Two new translations of poetry travel from ancient Sardinia to modern Paris" by Anahid Nersessian in The New York Review of Books.
So begins "The Republic of Translation/Two new translations of poetry travel from ancient Sardinia to modern Paris" by Anahid Nersessian in The New York Review of Books.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
22 comments:
Regarding translation, Google translate keeps getting better and better. You can tell it's evolved since LLMs hit the grid. I speak several languages, and for some languages it has clearly passed the threshold of machine jargon into non-native fluency. Where I have seen the most improvement is Chinese, Japanese, and other East Asian languages. It's impressive.
I like Chat to do translations of poetry because it has no ego so it doesn't try to compete with the original poet.
"Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven
far journeys, after he had sacked Troy's sacred citadel.
Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of,
many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea,
struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions.. - Homer, via Chat, from the. original Greek.
You can even ask it to footnote the text.
The same might be said about poetry.
translations are like sex?
was i the only one, that assumed translations meant gender transitions ?
William Morris was actually a communist, but at that time it wasn't yet Leninist and connected to mass murder, it was more a philosophical endpoint in a theory of history in which socialism was a step, but not yet the finished product. I find Morris interesting because his daughter, May Morris, was the love of GB Shaw's life.
Morris' manifesto is as turgid as his translation of the Odyssey.
"which many readers secretly consider a necessary evil"
Do they? If so, very, very secretly. I have never heard any fellow Americans complain about translation. Most seem happily, imperially monolingual. Actual foreign-language speakers of my acquaintance also don't consider it evil, since they read in the languages they care about. I myself feel nothing but gratitude toward great translators.
My sister, a Russian scholar, defines poetry as "that which cannot be translated'. She illustrates this with a Russian poem narrated by a mother who is sitting at the bedside of her sick child while longing to go out to a party. The poem concludes: "I want balls! Give me balls!"
>“There is a big secret about sex,” wrote Leo Bersani in 1987. “Most people don’t like it.”<
Is that so. Hmm, I would imagine that Mother Nature would be interested to know of this supposed failure of her very most critical plan.
Oh wait, OK, a read of Bersani's bio probably explains what amounts to an insightful assumption by him about "most people."
Chouraqui translated word for word and it comes out very well
Here are the sons of Shem
for their clans, for their tongues,
in their lands, for their peoples.
Here are the clans of the sons of Noah for their exploits,
in their peoples:
from the latter divide the peoples on earth, after the flood.
And it is all the earth: a single lip, one speech.
And it is at their departure from the Orient: they find a canyon,
in the land of Shine'ar;
They settle there.
They say, each to his like:
"Come, let us brick some bricks.
Let us fire them in the fire."
The brick becomes for them stone, the tar, mortar.
They say:
"Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower.
Its head: in the heavens.
Let us make ourselves a name,
that we not be scattered over the face of all the earth.
YHWH descends to see the city and the tower
that the sons of man have built.
YHWH says:
"Yes! A single people, a single lip for all:
that is what they begin to do! . . .
Come! Let us descend! Let us confound their lips,
man will no longer understand the lip of his neighbor."
YHWH disperses them from there over the face of all the earth.
They cease to build the city.
Over which he proclaims his name: Bavel, Confusion,
for there, YHWH confounds the lip of all the earth,
and from there YHWH disperses them over the face of all the earth.
Sex is overrated but guys' occasional needs keep it going. It's a quencher.
"'There is a big secret about sex,' wrote Leo Bersani in 1987. 'Most people don’t like it.'
You're doing it wrong.
I stopped reading after seeing "Most people don't like it."
Most people are either controlled or intimidated by it...like/dislike is the wrong concept.
"There is a big secret about sex,” wrote Leo Bersani in 1987. “Most people don’t like it."
Some editor must have deleted "with me" from the end of that.
i don't think he was doing it right
Great comparison...or cry for help.
---May Morris, was the love of GB Shaw's life.
I've never felt quite the same about Shaw after learning that he turned down Isadora Duncan's proposition. C'mon, what man would say No to that? Even his witty No.
Althouse writes, "The utopian socialist sounds like a beatnik."
I addressed a related question serval days ago when an off-topic comment posed a question about sibilance in classical Greek, specifically "ass's ears" in a myth about Midas. Does the Greek term that translates as ass's ears hiss like the English phrase?
I ventured the notion that in translating poetry it is often more important to preserve the elements of English poetry, especially rhyme and meter, than the literal meaning of the text as given in the original source. As an example, I referred to the Aeneid, comparing Virgil's Latin to its literal English translation, and then to a poetic translation. What starts as the paradigm of 1st-century BC Latin epic poetry translates literally into English prose, and rather dry and clumsy prose at that. A good translation of poetry must be poetic in itself according to the traditions of the objective language, at least that Quaestor's rule.
Does William Morris's Odyssey sound like a beatnik? Yeah, baby. Who but a cool cat would come up with "Holy Berg" and "Troy-town"? A square would stick with Illium, an uncool word that sounds like a chuck of your an-nat-oh-mee. And there's beat like bongoes. But then, it rhymes, man, and rhyme takes like discipline, like the Army, man. Like once you start it, ya gotta keep it up. Rhyme is like work, man. Squaresville, man.
I understand that there are some translations that exceed the original. Some English translation of Proust was said to be better than the original. Didn't inspire me to read Proust, but that was the story. They say Shakespeare doesn't lose the poetry in German and that the translation, for German speakers anyway, is more accessible....I can read the newspaper in Spanish, but I'll never be able to appreciate the mystery of the language. I read Borges in Spanish. His stories are very strange and when you read them in a Spanish that you don't fully understand, they are even stranger.
I'm sure that within the next generation or two, they will perfect the sex robots or vr experience, and we can all stop fretting abut sex. Given the amount of time one spends expressing and/or repressing one's sexual wishes, it's a tremendous time drain. I could have easily learned several foreign languages if I hadn't wasted all that time in sexual pursuits....Now that I'm eighty, I don't waste time on sex and have time to pursue other interests. I'm presently translating Finnegan's Wake into Spanish. It's hard to match the puns and portmanteau words with their Spanish equivalent but it's so much less frustrating than pursuit of enduring sexual fulfillment.
"Most people don't like sex..."
Speak for yourself, beatnik scum.
I get it. Just like sex, the only thing worse than a bad translation is no translation.
“It’s a quencher”
Ladies will never understand.
Post a Comment