Raholeun wrote: ↑Sat Jan 05, 2019 1:26 pm
Salmoneus wrote: ↑Sat Jan 05, 2019 12:02 pm
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.")
Salmoneus wrote: ↑Sat Jan 05, 2019 12:02 pm
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.
