The Contradictory Feelings Thread

[Raholeun]

Ah, Тихий Дон. One of these I-hate-you-but-I-love-you-books, given that many translations have unfortunately economized some of the interesting subplots and the more rustic prose of the original. My Dutch translation for instance (De stille Don, trans. Jac. v.d. Ster, no date, but surely before 1966) has 451 pages. The 2006 edition of the Dutch version has 1400 pages.

Besides this genocidal loss of words, the pre-1966 translation really doesn't even try to be imaginative. To give you an idea; the last stanza of the opening poem (the Old Kossack's song) uses troebel three times, to translate what is in Russian a set of semantically multi-layered idioms. The ехонек-suffix is a diminutive of sorts, but that is in no way represented in the translation of мутнехонек troebel zijn. With regards to the final line, even google translate does a more creative job by translating рыбица мутит as vis roert or "fish stirs up" rather than the boring vis vertroebelt as I have it in print.

I do look forward to reading your take on this classic, Salmoneus.

[Salmoneus]

It may take a while... but my initial reaction is: it's incredibly grimdark. If it weren't so well-written, it would be almost laughable how grimdark it was. I mean, the opening chapter has a pregnant woman being kicked to death by a xenophobic lynch mob, and it just seems to get darker from there.

I'm only a hundred pages in or so, and the most striking bit so far was Grishka's wedding, which is remarkably... cinematographic? I don't know if Sholokhov was reacting to early Soviet experimental cinema, or if cinema has reacted to Sholokhov, but it reads like a hundred film scenes since: the babble of unrelated images and dialogue as the protagonist is overwhelmed by it all, the step-by-step zoom-in on someone's disgusting mouth and tongue...


Regarding your example, my old translation offers:
"Why dost thou, gentle Don, flow so troubledly?"
"Ah, how should I, the gentle Don, not flow troubledly?
From my depths, the depths of the Don, the cold springs beat;
Amid me, the gentle Don, the white fish leap."

My new translation offers:
Why dost thou, the quiet Don, so sludgy flow?
How could I, the quiet Don, but sludgy flow?
From my depths the cold springs rise
Amid me the white fish leap.

I think 'sludgy' might be an example of making it too colloquial, and it certainly has a different sense than (the admittedly ugly) 'troubledly' - troubled flow seems to make more sense, since the leaping fish and rising springs don't seem to equate to sludginess. Dropping the repetitions of 'Don' in the last two lines makes it much better English poetry, but maybe loses a bit of the flavour of the original style. On the other hand, how the hell the first translator could have missed the chance for "the quiet Don", given that it's the first words of a book CALLED 'the quiet Don', I don't know...


Just looking in the two randomly, the first translation either drops or compresses so much, and gets some things just wrong. Like, the new translation has Korshunov accuse his wife of stroking him like a cow with a calf, whereas the old one has him say that she's stroking him AS IF HE were a cow with a calf - surely the former is what is intended!
The new one has a line about how a party of Old Believers came to the town to propose to his daughter - the old one compresses it to just say that she'd had proposals from old believers. The old one has Stepan shouting from the steps, the new one has "the bruised and bloodied" Stepan shouting from the porch; the old one has someone bringing up two horses, the new one has somone bringing up a fifteen-hand stallion and a mare. Why would the translator just ignore these things - they're not controversial, they're not confusingly cultural, they don't save much time. Was he just really in a hurry!? And bizarrely, the new translation ends a chapter with two short paragraphs of foreshadowing, suggesting that one character will kill another in the future at a particular place, and the old translation just cuts that entirely. Why? That's not a translation decision, that's an editorial decision!

This is what's baffling me about the old translation. I knew it didn't have the last three parts - those were published separately, some years later, as, to be fair, they were originally in Russia (indeed, the translation was originally made before the last three parts were written). And I'd also gathered some abridgements had been made by cutting out some of the more baffling bits of background cultural worldbuilding, which... I wish it hadn't done, but you can see why an editor back then might have thought a western audience would be unfairly confused and bored by it. But the fact that he just randomly cut out adjectives and little anecdotes and authorial asides, that was unexpected, and frankly a little horrifying!

[to be fair, you'd have to be a scholar to assign blame correctly - the old translation is based on the censored, early-Soviet-era Russian edition, which had already undergone some hacking before it came into English hands. It's hard to imagine some of these cuts being made by Soviets for political reasons, but it's easy to underestimate Soviet paranoia. And of course some of their editing may have been genuine editing for literary reasons... (with Soviet writers we tend to think the original, un-edited text is the 'real' and 'better' book, but of course the things we read by Western writers are themselves all given the benefit of editing...)]

ALSO, while I'm ranting about it: the divisions are all different! The old translation has four parts, divided into chapters. The new translation has four books, divided into eight parts... except that the two books that equate to the material in the old translation cover FIVE parts in the new translation, not four. Why would someone go through and 'translate' five parts by redividing them into four parts? And it's not just the parts. At least some of the chapter divisions are in different places - what's a chapter end in the old translation is only a mid-chapter break in the new one (although the new one has plenty of short chapters itself).

--------


Anyway, my old one was a 1974 Penguin edition of the original 1934 translation by Gary. The new one is a 1997 edition of Murphy's revision of Daglish's 1984 translation (the official matter says 'revised and edited' by Murphy, while Murphy himself refers to "my translation", though he admits it's based on Daglish's translation). Supposedly, this is the only "complete" version in English, restoring some sections that had been changed by Soviet editors and never restored in English translations until this point.

[it seems a bit ridiculous that a book that singlehandedly won its author the Nobel Prize, and that was massively popular at one point in Russia and even had a measure of popularity and fame in the West at one point, is only "accurately" presented in English in a single edition...]

It's also a far more 'scholarly' volume - clearly they've tried to do it right. There's a scholarly introduction, a note on the text (which politely notes that things were "confused" by the publication of Gary's old translation), a timeline of Sholokhov's life and times, a series of maps of the region, a note on critical attitudes to the author, suggested further reading, and even, and ingeniously, a "text summary" - one-line summaries of what happens in each chapter, in case you get lost... (more books should have one of those!).

[Raholeun]

I'm only a hundred pages in or so, and the most striking bit so far was Grishka's wedding, which is remarkably... cinematographic? I don't know if Sholokhov was reacting to early Soviet experimental cinema, or if cinema has reacted to Sholokhov, but it reads like a hundred film scenes since: the babble of unrelated images and dialogue as the protagonist is overwhelmed by it all, the step-by-step zoom-in on someone's disgusting mouth and tongue...

It has been at least 8 years since I read it, but I do recall thinking of some scenes in Lynch's Eraserhead while reading the book; the same horrified, misanthropic en profil view of human anatomy.

I think 'sludgy' might be an example of making it too colloquial, and it certainly has a different sense than (the admittedly ugly) 'troubledly' - troubled flow seems to make more sense, since the leaping fish and rising springs don't seem to equate to sludginess.

That's quite remarkable, given that the Dutch uses troebel, which means "murky" and certainly does not carry the connotation of "troubled" in the sense of "problematic" or "disturbed", but those two terms are etymologically cognate. Which leads me to suspect my version might not be a translation directly from the Russian..

[to be fair, you'd have to be a scholar to assign blame correctly - the old translation is based on the censored, early-Soviet-era Russian edition, which had already undergone some hacking before it came into English hands. It's hard to imagine some of these cuts being made by Soviets for political reasons, but it's easy to underestimate Soviet paranoia. And of course some of their editing may have been genuine editing for literary reasons... (with Soviet writers we tend to think the original, un-edited text is the 'real' and 'better' book, but of course the things we read by Western writers are themselves all given the benefit of editing...)]

A related point is that books in the original are always thought of as a priori superior to their translations. "Tradurre è tradire", sao they say. This does not necessarily seem the case and I have some misgivings with regards to the premise which underlies that statement. The act of translation is a creative act in its own right, why should the translator not possess artistic powers that cause the book to be more beautifully written, or more multi-layered than the original. Can the cross-language adaptation not add artistic value to the work?

ALSO, while I'm ranting about it: the divisions are all different!

My version has 24 chapters with no higher level divisions into parts marked.

[Salmoneus]

I think 'sludgy' might be an example of making it too colloquial, and it certainly has a different sense than (the admittedly ugly) 'troubledly' - troubled flow seems to make more sense, since the leaping fish and rising springs don't seem to equate to sludginess.

That's quite remarkable, given that the Dutch uses troebel, which means "murky" and certainly does not carry the connotation of "troubled" in the sense of "problematic" or "disturbed", but those two terms are etymologically cognate. Which leads me to suspect my version might not be a translation directly from the Russian..

Huh!
So you have 'troebel', which means "murky" but sounds like "troubled", and I have a choice between "troubled" or "sludgy" (which might be a way of saying murky?)... it almost seems like the English might be copying the Dutch!

So what IS the word in the original?

A related point is that books in the original are always thought of as a priori superior to their translations. "Tradurre è tradire", sao they say. This does not necessarily seem the case and I have some misgivings with regards to the premise which underlies that statement. The act of translation is a creative act in its own right, why should the translator not possess artistic powers that cause the book to be more beautifully written, or more multi-layered than the original. Can the cross-language adaptation not add artistic value to the work?

That's a fascinating question, and one which, as a monolingual, I'm not best placed to answer...

Over time, the perceived value of translations has steadily declined. In the 17th century, many things were claimed as translations that weren't, simply because being a translation made something seem more artistic. Over time, translations have gone from the most privileged artform to one of the least.

But I think a lot of the problem - aside from the general growing conviction that value is directly proportional to originality, which inherently makes translations even worse than remakes - is that a translation has TWO values: it has value qua translation, and it has value qua work of art in its own right. And generally these two values are at odds - do you try to produce the best work in the target language, or the work that most adequately translates the original? The declining value of translations has gone hand-in-hand with the increasing strictness applied to faithfulness of translation. In the 17th century, a "translation" could be little more than a related story - as when, for instance, Rochester 'translated' one of the Greek myths as the story of a woman masturbating in a pigsty - and translations were greatly acclaimed. By the 19th century, a translation had to at least convey the spirit of the original, but the actual words could have little to do with those in the original - as in, for example, Shelley's translation of the Marsaillaise, which creates entire images wholesale, while retaining the metre and sentiment of the original - and translations were respected. By the 21st century, translations are expected to be the most faithful conversion of the text possible - necessary deviations are themselves explained by reasoning that, for example, a literal translation of an idiom may be avoided if it would fail to translate the intended sense to the average reader - and translations have very little attention paid to them indeed, and are more the province of the scholar than the artist. [Murphy, for instance, who translated my Sholokhov, has his write-up comment not only on his literary scholarship, but on his academic articles on linguistics and on Russian history - no mention is made of any great skill he may have as a poet, playwright or author.]

Most translations are at best adequate, and not infrequently bad, because a good translation requires someone who is both a scholar AND a great writer in their own right. And while, once upon a time, great writers were drawn to work as translators, not only for money but for the great prestige, that time is not now. You see the occasional gimmick-casting of a famous translator, but it's very rare.

That said, there are traditionally considered to be works where the translation is more of a classic than the original. I can't off-hand think of any exactly, but there's a long English tradition of translations of Iliad - those by Chapman and Pope in particular had classic status in their own right, and are rivalled by translations by Hobbes, Dryden, Macpherson, Cowper, Arnold, Butler and Graves. Chapman's, of course, inspired probably the only truly famous poem about a translation*. The only modern equivalent I'm aware of is Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, which in turn follows a tradition made famous by Ezra Pound's translations of Anglo-Saxon. Notably, however, all of these, from Chapman down to Heaney, have been criticised by more careful scholars for their departures from the text (Chapman in particular adds a lot of asides that aren't present in Homer; Cowper was the first to actually boast of NOT making additions to the text, rather than of doing so). There were many 'translations in the early modern period that became classics in their own right - those of Dryden, and Marlowe, for example.

Ahha! Thought of one! The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is a very loose translation of a random selection of short poems attributed to a mostly-mythical poet; it's a classic of English verse to an extent that far outstrips the significance of any of the poems in their original tradition. It wouldn't be allowed these days!
The Rubaiyat writes, for instance:
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Whereas today translations must instead say:
I desire a little ruby wine and a book of verses,
Just enough to keep me alive, and half a loaf is needful;
And then, that I and thou should sit in a desolate place
Is better than the kingdom of a sultan.

...as FitzGerald wrote about his Rubaiyat, "better a live sparrow than a stuffed eagle."

And thinking of it, another tradition where this is significant is in translation from Irish. Many of the great Irish poets have "translated" from Irish into English, usually with the purpose of rewritting the original into a political commentary on British imperialism. "Róisín Dubh", for example, for a long time was better known through the "translations" by Mangan and then Pearse than in the original (and the 'original' is itself a political re-writing of an earlier love song - in the same way that, for example, Óró sé do bheatha abhaile, a traditional boat-hauling song, was rewritten as a fake old rebel song about Gráinne Mhaol by Pearse, in order to in turn be used as a protest song agains the British).


ANYWAY. To get back on track, I'd suggest one interesting example of what we're talking about: the film, The Prestige. Hang on, you may be thinking, that's not translated. No - but very similar issues arise, because it's an adaptation from a novel. In this case, I find it really striking, not because the film is better than the novel - it isn't, by far - but because the act of adaptation is itself a work of art in this case. Effectively, in order to 'translate' the novel to the screen, the screenwriters have completely changed the entire plot - and yet in doing so, they've created something far more faithful to the spirit of the novel than a direct translation would have been. They've tried to do on the screen what the author does on the page, even though that's required massive changes, particularly to the order of events. [to simplify: the book relies on concealing information from the audience that could not easily be concealed on the page; so the film instead reveals quickly what the book withholds, while instead concealing information that the book reveals relatively quickly for much longer. It's a really brave translation decision, and it's what makes the film interesting.]


*Keats' "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer", for many generations more famous than either Chapman or Homer:
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

(also as famously liberal about history and geography as Chapman was about Homer: there quite notoriously are no peaks in Darien, the world's most miserable swamp, Cortez never went to Darien, and indeed Cortez never saw the Pacific. Keats has, as it were, translated the facts into poetry. As one of my favourite novels - at least, its translation from Dutch to English - has it: "Gelderman’s story strikes to the soul of the rider, and is therefore true. / Those pictures are inaccurate.")

ALSO, while I'm ranting about it: the divisions are all different!

My version has 24 chapters with no higher level divisions into parts marked.
[/quote]
I have 21 chapters in part 2 alone!

...maybe we can conclude that the original did not include chapters? It did include some sort of higher organisation, though, as it was not published as a single volume originally.

[Raholeun]

Huh!
So you have 'troebel', which means "murky" but sounds like "troubled", and I have a choice between "troubled" or "sludgy" (which might be a way of saying murky?)... it almost seems like the English might be copying the Dutch!

So what IS the word in the original?

The second stanza of the song/poem reads:

Ой ты, наш батюшка тихий Дон!
Ой, что же ты, тихий Дон, мутнехонек течешь?
Ах, как мне, тихому Дону, не мутну течи!
Со дна меня, тиха Дона, студены ключи бьют,
Посередь меня, тиха Дона, бела рыбица мутит.

The verb мути́ть, of which the underlined forms are all derivations, means "to stir up, to make turbid, to cloud", but it also carries a sense of both physiological unease, nausea as well as psychological disturbance. Wiktionary suggests the Proto-Slavic source męsti "to stir, to trouble". In retrospect, I wish to retract the initial criticism of the translation as troebel/trouble, given that the original meaning of these two words actually comes pretty close.

Three hoorays for etymological translations I guess?

[Linguoboy]

When the Powers That Be decided to turn the staff office adjoining mine into a study room, they did nothing at all to alter the sound-conducting properties of the wallboard separating us. This wasn't an issue for me and my colleagues, by now I've got a rotating cast of randos every week. Naturally they assume the room is soundproof. (After all, they can't hear us working quietly.) We've had people literally screaming in there and, every once in a while, I get fed up and ask them to quieten down.

Today's crowd of loud laughers was so cowed that it's been dead silent in there since I popped my head in. I'm not mad, but I kinda want to go back and say, "I didn't say you couldn't have any fun. Just, you know, keep in mind that the walls have ears."

[alice]

I'm having to stay home from work today. This might not sound like much but it's probably the last chance I have to convince my employer that I can meet their hourly requirements.

[alice]

I can't, and they've had to dismiss me on grounds of incapacity.

[Risla]

I can't, and they've had to dismiss me on grounds of incapacity.

That really sucks. I'm sorry to hear that.

[alice]

I can't, and they've had to dismiss me on grounds of incapacity.

That really sucks. I'm sorry to hear that.

Thanks. It was coming, admittedly, and they were very nice about it, which helped. All the same, I'll soon have to investigate New Ways Of Working.

[Salmoneus]

On the one hand, somebody on public transport was playing youtube clips incredibly loud, without even bothering with headphones or anything (and it was loud enough that we wouldn't have been able to avoid it even if WE'D all had headphones).

On the other hand, they were clips from The Day Today.



I had contradictory feelings.

[Ryusenshi]

Currently learning C++. So far, I seem to get the hang of it. But it's hard.

I saw a remark somewhere (but can't find the original wording). All programming languages allow you to shoot yourself in the foot, but C++ hands you a loaded gun and paints a target on your shoe.

[Travis B.]

C++ isn't too bad when one codes using an idiomatic C++ coding style. It is hard when one essentially codes in C but with objects. Of course this is aside from deep arcana such as template metaprogrammic, when I personally have never wrapped my brain around.

[Ryusenshi]

It is hard when one essentially codes in C but with objects.

Uh, that's too bad, because that's more or less what I have been doing so far. (Though I have never seriously used C either.)

[Linguoboy]

I have a friend who's an architect. He recently completed an ambitious project for my city of residence and I'm very happy for him. However, I'm also very concerned about the project, which feels like it's being rushed through without enough public comment. So every time he posts about it clearing another regulatory hurdle, I feel conflicted. It confirms my suspicions that it's not receiving enough scrutiny, but any significant changes would mean more long hours for him and time away from his exciting new project.

[Travis B.]

It is hard when one essentially codes in C but with objects.

Uh, that's too bad, because that's more or less what I have been doing so far. (Though I have never seriously used C either.)

In my opinion, straight C is a language every programmer should know, even if they end up doing little work in it. It is essentially as close as one can program to the metal without coding in assembly or Forth (Forth is a language is a language that is simultaneously higher-level and lower-level than C that I also think a programmer should know, even though many are quick to (wrongly) relegate it to the dustbin of history*).

* disclaimer: I am doing a lot of work in Forth as of late, since I am working on my second Forth implementation. (If you want to implement a programming language, not as a toy implementation but rather a full-fledged one, I strongly recommend Forth, since the core of any Forth is typically very small and one can build it up incrementally from very little.)

[Linguoboy]

There's something so melancholy about coming across a book that you would have loved when you were younger and realising you really have no use for it.

I was browsing one of the few remaining used bookstores in the Chicago area today and came across S. Robert Ramsey's The languages of China. I all but pounced on it. But after leafing through it a bit, I decided I couldn't justify buying in outdated dead paper so much information that I knew already or could easily look up on Wikipedia. It made me sad because I mused that if I'd come across it even a decade after it was originally published (1987), I would have wrung it for every drop I could. I would have copied out words into notebooks and reread sections again and again, the way I did with Leo Moser's The Chinese mosaic (1985). But now it's little more than a curiosity to me.

(It's not all sad, though: Right next to it was Ping Chen's Chinese: history and sociolinguistics, which is coming home with me.)

[zompist]

I have that book— you're welcome to borrow it!

(Glancing through it, it doesn't compete with the amount of info packed into Jerry Norman's Chinese. But it has some nice sections on non-Sinitic languages.)

[Ryusenshi]

There's something so melancholy about coming across a book that you would have loved when you were younger and realising you really have no use for it.

Even more melancholy: a book that you did love when you were younger, but then you realize you will never open it again and can't justify keeping it. I had to get rid of so many books when I moved...

[Vijay]

I have that book— you're welcome to borrow it!

(Glancing through it, it doesn't compete with the amount of info packed into Jerry Norman's Chinese. But it has some nice sections on non-Sinitic languages.)

I have both of those books right here in my room! They were the required textbooks for a course I took in college called "Why Chinese Has No Alphabet." That was one of my favorite courses.