Loosed in Translation discussion
The Nature of Translation
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Why do you read translations?
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I feel the same way, Jimmy. Many of my favorite poets are American, but whenever I feel discouraged by what seems like wheel-spinning in contemporary and emerging American poetry, or whenever I feel bummed out about the networky, ego-driven poe-biz, I turn to non-American poems. Some favorites that I keep going back to are Radnoti, Lorca, Neruda, Montale, Rilke, Akhmatova, Salamun, Issa, Basho… These poets have more at stake than becoming the next AWP star. They keep me centered and they remind why poetry is important.
hi all I read mainly translated works and blog about them
Two reasons, mainly:1. I am trapped in my head, I want to escape being inside my head, and my head is an American head.
2. I like politically or historically informed books. I think (perhaps unjustly) that Europeans do this better. I really like this passage by Fanny Howe:
"There is no longer any class outside the class of character, and no history to put your faith in.
You can actually live as if you have no culture, no perspective particular to a date in time.
You are an individual whose prime and solitary property is your own body.
Dying becomes a hell beyond all reason or justice in this ahistorical context."
Re: Tove JanssonI'm assuming you already have the D&Q books. You should definitely check out the Moomin Voices cd. It's a great listen, especially in winter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moomin
I was inspired to start reading books from other countries like Let the Right One In, ( I love the title, it as if someone whispered or hiss that in my face as I read it!), and As God Commands, and also The Slap. I will have to check out the translator for that book since I think the author started out with 'Let Me In' but I like the new title better.
I read translations because I think it would be odd and frankly perverse to shut yourself off from so much of the literature that mankind has produced. Not many people speak more than two or three languages, and a great number of English-speakers are monolingual. Whilst there's a lot of great books written in English, there are also a lot of great books in Spanish, Russian, French, German, Japanese, etc, etc. Why would anybody want to miss out on Proust and García Márquez (to pick just the examples that spring to mind quickest)?Actually, my favourite novel in all the world I read in translation, and have actually never read the original - although I hope to one day. It's Independent People by Halldór Laxness, wonderfully translated by J.A. Thompson, if anyone's interested.
Mod
Hello, my name is Ryan. I love the idea of translations as approaching the greatness of the books in their original language. Although I have favorite writers in English, I feel that reading them all the time is very limiting. What attracts me to international literature is the diversity of experiences, the openness, and the exposure to different styles and modes of thinking. Reading translated books is akin to traveling to places you cannot otherwise reach in any way. It's a mind-expanding activity.
The writers I've been reading/collecting include Bolaño, Borges, Saramago, Marías, Cercas, Sebald, Bernhard, Aira, Sōseki, Tanizaki, Ryū Murakami, Guimarães Rosa, and Saint-Exupéry.
There are some truly wonderful translators without whom we would be culturally very much the poorer.You German speakers know of this, because was it Schiller (was it? I am not going to cheat and look it up) who translated much of Shakespeare so fluently into German that many Germans consider Shakespeare to be a German writer? Outside German, I wonder if Shakespeare is as well served in any other language.
There are several translators whose names are household names in English as translators, who are synonymous with the author or works they translated.
Two in modern times leap to mind. Scott Moncrieff so successfully translated A la recherche du temps perdu that successive attempts have only succeeded in hyphenating their name to Scott's. In other words, each attempt was by way of a little housekeeping, the odd phrase here, a comma there. A recent attempt by Penguin did not dislodge Moncrieff.
Similarly Constance Garnet brought Russian literature, especially Chekhov, to two or three generations of English readers. Even today, some of her translations are still favoured.
Not all translators gain this kind of fame. Some gain a distinct notoriety. Such is the case with the novels of Thomas Mann. However, the grip of Helen (H. T.) Lowe-Porter is so pervasive, especially in the US, it is difficult to find alternative translations of many, if not most, of the titles. I find her poisonous to the prose and would happily escape back into the writer's home language if I could.
Fortunately, few translators do such damage to their authors. Fortunately also, the lovely Death In Venice escapes her Dracula-like clutch and many translations are available.
Going back in time, Chapman is still held synonymous with Homer and his translations, after all these years, are readily available and frequently come back into print. Before that, translators tended to make the work their own as Chaucer did with many of the Italian works he drew on.
One cannot look back without mentioning the, no I have to capitalize it, THE great translation in English. King James I and V Bible, for long known as the Authorized Version. None of the modern language versions match the sheer eloquence and poetry of that version, written improbably by a committee (at least, so it is said).
What I really wanted to point our attention to, though, is how well we are presently served by some outstanding translators in two languages.
Margaret Jull Costa and Edith Grossman have between them translated a wealth of wonderful work from the Spanish into English. We would be so much poorer without their efforts. There are others translating Spanish, of course, but the quality of the translations and the sheer wonderfulness of the works these two women consistently translate means that one can confidently pick up an author translated by either one of them and be sure the work is worth reading.
The other language which has been consistently served by a handful of excellent translators is German. Here we have Michael Hoffman, Michael Hamberger, and Ralph Manheim. Thirty years worth of readers on both sides of the Atlantic have been introduced to many, many wonderful German works through the efforts of these gentlemen.
Other translators are familiar to me because of a love of the author's works.
Robert and Elizabeth Chandler have brought me many a wonderful Platonov, and Michael Glenny Bulgakov, including his highly engaging, A Country Doctor's Notebook. And Archibald Colquhoun seems inseparable from Lampedusa, who to my vast regret wrote too, too little.
But never mind, I can replay scene upon scene in my mind,
"The Princess Maria Stella climbed into the carriage, sat down on the blue satin cushion and gathered around her as many rustling folds of her dress as she could." p145, Harvill, 1993.
How much poorer would we be in English without sentences such as these.
"Chevalley thought: 'This state of things won't last; our lively new modern administrations will change it all.' The Prince was depressed. 'All this shouldn't last; but it will, always; the human "always" of course, a century, two centuries .... and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards and the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.' "
"Chevalley [...] moistened the tip of his index finger with saliva and cleaned a pane for the width of an eye [...] under the ashen light, the landscape lurched to and fro, irredeemable." p128, same ed.
Who writes like this in English? No one I know of. How many English writers have read these lines, in Italian or in English, and their writing as a result became immeasurably the richer because of it?
Let us champion those vast legions, who, over the centuries, through their knowledge of a tongue foreign to us, laboured, and labour still, to bring us the written jewels, though sometimes dross, from those corners of the earth which English has not settled its manacling hand.
Here is Edith Grossman talking about translation.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles...
Awesome post, Malcolm! My life would certainly be poorer without Edith Grossmann, Ralph Manheim and many others.
How can I let such wonderful response go by without acknowledgment. A humble thank you, Patty.
At the heart of the need for translation is the spread of the vernacular and at the heart of the rise of the vernacular is Dante's Divine Comedy. Dante takes an odd mixture of classical and biblical references, settings and characters, and wraps them around a secular love. In creating the language in which to celebrate his love for Beatrice, Dante is said to have fathered the Italian language. Dante's success in creating a literary language led to many imitators across Europe.In parallel to the rise of vernaculars was the emergence of the nation state.
The language of the Roman Empire had been adopted as the language of the church in Europe, and since the church dominated teaching, it became the universal language of the learned throughout the continent, from the fall of the empire until the emergence of the vernaculars in print, which occurred a couple of centuries after the emergence of Dante's epic. The growth of other vernaculars took quite some time. Few areas, later to become nations, could claim writers of Dante's ability, at least not until considerably later.
Prior to the emergence of the nation state, boundaries were blurry and territories ruled by any one individual (king, prince, margrave, whatever) quite small. People with the means and the position could move quite freely across the continent and surrounding territories. As a result, a suite of languages was a part of such people's luggage.
The number of courts in Europe at the time was considerable (the area we now view as Germany might have had 20 or more) and courts intermarried, and, with the intermarriage went court personnel from the court of the bride to the court of the groom, taking their languages with them. Since courts were wealthy, they gathered around them the learned and gifted (who had to earn a living somehow).
This flux continued up to and past the time of the Mad George of England.
The spread of the printed book meant, on the one hand, access to the written word far more cheaply than previously, and a rise in literacy, now mainly in the vernacular.
With the emergence of the nation state comes a self conscious centralized state government which is determined that the people living within its borders shall be citizens of that state and state education emerges as a phenomenon, first in one country, then in another, all across the continent. And the language of that state education is the vernacular.
Stepping back a little, at about the time that book printing is spreading widely across Europe, certain adventurous souls, supported by these new national governments, sail off in little wooden boats, some not much larger than SUVs, all across the globe, returning with untold wealth with which to pour into their nations' coffers.
This resulted in a vast class of wealthy merchants who mostly surrounded the ports from which the little cockle shells sailed to and from. To the children of the learned who needed schooling were added the children of the much wealthier merchants. In response to this demand, a positive rash of merchant schools opened all across the continent.
The schools of the learned and the merchant schools all followed the curriculum that church schools had used, and was still using from the time of the fall of the Roman Empire. Central to that curriculum was the learning of a great deal of Latin and a little Greek and usually, depending on location, other languages as well.
For a variety of reasons, the majority of newly emergent nation states saw large natural increases in their populations. This saw a huge increase in a relatively short time of the numbers of people literate yet, being state educated, literate in the vernacular.
The readers of most nations, up until relatively recently times, had tongues enough to read two, three or more languages.
For sixty or more years now that has not been true.
Translators as much as interpreters bring the tongues and words of others to make them intelligible to our eyes and ears. One can only view this with awe. Best selling authors can claim their books being translated into tens and scores of languages.
Despite the assertion that only three per cent of all that is published in English derives from another tongue, parts of the globe still, despite widespread literacy in those regions, publish little that you and I would regard as literature, far less anything literary deriving from outside that language area.
By any measure, we are well off. With a little effort, much translated literature is available to us and, with the migration of print to the web, much more will be.
One has to wonder what change we will see.
Europe saw enormous changes as a result of the change from pen and parchment to paper and type. Can we not put, among other developments, the rise of science down to that change.
With the migration from paper and type to electronic screen and pixel, will we see any less a set of changes? You doubt it? So do I.
In being English speakers, you and I live in translation.English is a mono-Babel, a mongrel among more pure languages. In England at the seaside you can buy rock, a stick of hard candy with colour stripes all the way through. English has those stripes all the way through, A to Z.
The English language is a multilayered language. That makes the language extremely flexible, and vastly articulated. You can speak and write in a street slang, in a colloquial form, or a more elegant, elevated and refined way.
You can adopt the Anglo-Saxon, all those glorious four letter words. Or you can be highly Latinate. Words full of prefixes and suffixes. Vowels can be hard and gluttal or thin and squealing. Consonants hiss and spit in English, Word after word in English tend to brake to avoid collision with each other rather than glide like so many swans on a lake.
The language seems to set a tone of reason in where it pitches itself, rather than being abrupt, or emotional, or cold and clipped.
The sheer flexibility, vast vocabulary, enormous range, and essential nuancing seem to have attracted countless foreigners who came from very different tongues to adopt our tongue and write in it very successfully. Very few have migrated out of the language, such as Samuel Beckett and, most recently Jonathan Littell, (of the Kindly Ones translated from the French of Les Bienveillantes). [Anyone read it?]
The richness of English derives both from its pedigree and its ability to absorb foreign words. Over its history it has swallowed with equal measure those words which it completely Englishfied and those which it has taken on whole. There seems to be no rule of thumb as to which words get treated in which way.
And it's a half-reformed, half-modernised language. But it got stuck somewhere along the line. The grammar and structure are inconsistent. Some words agree, some don't. Generations of children have struggled to master a language which defies their own internal sense of grammatical structure. As have countless numbers coming to the language for the first time at various stages of their lives.
Don't even mention the spelling! Poor Webster spent a great deal of his life trying to reform the spelling never living long enough to finish the process. (Parenthetically, his Dictionary is my favourite. It beats my Oxfords)
Yet it is the spelling which points to English's kaleidoscope nature, those layers which constitute the language.
Here is the cone of the language starting at the bottom.
British. The original language of the British Isles. If any trace of this language remains, no convincing case that I know of points to it.
Romans. They bring Latin which drowns the existing language.
Anglo-Saxons. Many forms of a Germanic tongue arrive to largely supplant Latin. Not enough written forms of the language survive for us to say much. At heart ours is an Anglo-Saxon language. The Anglo-Saxon kernel remains.
Reading Beowulf in the original, even just a few lines, tells us, "This is the parent of our language."
John Gardner's Grendel is an excellent introduction to the story.
The next biggie, the juggernaut, is Norman French (1066 and all that).
The case of the influence of and non-absorption of Norman French into English is a most curious one. I know of no study which in any way comes to grips with this fascinating story.
Now comes the central figure who makes English English. Geoffrey Chaucer.
If you have stayed with me this far, here is what is meant by you and I living in translation.
A great flowering of literature in many forms is taking place across all of Europe. Geoffrey takes his stories from the French, the Italian, and from the Latin and translates them into English.
But what English! English as Geoffrey receives it is a limited tin-ear language. He takes Norman French, puts it through his writer's mincer and, Hey Presto, we have a much enriched language, full of wonderful stories, most of which Geoffrey has translated.
Now here comes the rub. Geoffrey's language, when we read him, is identifiably English, more so than Beowulf. But it seems too distant, at least to me. I struggle with the original, it is close but not close enough. I am jarred by its not synchronising with my inner ear. And consistently since school (I mean middle school where I was first introduced to him) I have failed to find translators - that is present day speakers of our native tongue - who can do this man's writing justice.
For centuries now Geoffrey Chaucer has been celebrated as the great poet in the English language. I have yet to find anybody who brings the man's work to life. The modern day translations of Canterbury Tales that I have and have come across are in prose and flat and lifeless. In England one prose translation has dominated the landscape and it does no service to Chaucer the poet at all, any more than the Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare bring that playwrights plays to life.
Here is a major problem with translation. If all that the translation does is bring the story into the translated language, what do we have? A cadaver. A lifeless corps. The magic of Geoffrey Chaucer, the poet, of whom so many over the centuries have extolled, is lost.
If you have read a modern-day verse translation of Canterbury Tales you enjoyed, be sure to let me know.
We are living in translation. We live in a language garden full of the flowers, brilliant and perfumed, by the stories, plays and poems infused into English over the centuries by translators bringing them into our garland'd tongue.To be fair to Mary and Charles Lamb, their intention in telling the tales of Shakespeare was to introduce the stories to children.
Shakespeare requires little translation himself. He is better seen and heard in performance, something not always easy due to the predilection of producing Shakespeare outdoors. Few actors are trained in a declamatory style. Shakespeare himself coached his own time through the mouth of Hamlet to the Players.
This is unfortunate. Shakespeare, therefore is best heard indoors. Our Brando-mumbling stage poets require a close ear!
What glories, though. What language! Who has worked the tongue as did he?
But he is a translator. Perhaps not literally, since there is so much argument as to how many languages he possessed. But it doesn't matter. Look at the range of stories he brings. Hamlet from Denmark. Othello, Shylock and many others from Italy. French,Latin and Greek sources were drawn upon. Other sources are the histories and chronicles of England and his own fertile imagination.
At this point of the story we must pause.
The next translation's influence upon all of us who speak this tongue of ours is so great that we are barely aware of how pervasive is its reach. The translation we will consider next has such a dramatic influence on our language that we almost do not perceive its presence.
If we take out of English the influences of this one translation, our language, our culture, indeed our daily frames of reference are reduced to such an extent, that that extent is, at least to my mind, truly unimaginable.
The work I am speaking of had been locked up with the Latin language for 1500 years. Those who could read it and those who could understand hearing it, had to have Latin.
The work I speak of is the Bible.
For all those years, the lay, that is you and I, had dutifully trooped off to listen to the learned read aloud from the Vulgate (the Latin version of the Bible) and not understood a single word that was said. Of course preaching was in English. Why else would you go? But the reading from the Bible was from the pulpit and read aloud to the lay only in Latin.
But with the first printings of translations of the Bible into English, at last were accessible, to all who could read, the almost unimaginably large store of stories contained within its Books, particularly the Old Testament.
I do not need to labour the point. A simple string of names will immediately have you realize how extraordinary is its reach into our lives. Now, in considering this list, I ask that you put aside your belief, or non-belief for that matter, and consider the impact of these stories as stories.
Noah, Job, Adam and Eve, the story of the Good Samaritan. The imagery, the figures of speech, the tremendous range of utterly memorable characters. And so on.
Now, not for one moment do I imagine that England was bereft of good stories and good story telling prior the publication of the Bible in English. It defies thinking about to do anything other than imagine that the story telling life of England was rich. We can be sure that priests from their pulpits regularly retold stories from the Bible during the course of their sermons to their flocks.
What we can say is how much the translation of the Bible made the language richer. So many writers in English from this point on, right through to the present day, write prose and poetry filled with glories got directly from the Bible.
But there is more to this living in translation than that already mentioned.With Latin as the universal language of Europe being flung flat on the floor by the newly printed vernaculars, finally the extraordinary glories of Greece and Rome emerge, blinking in the sunlight after being hidden for centuries in dusky libraries.
Consider just one classical source, Aesop's Fables, and just two of these fables, The Fox and the Grapes, and The Hare and the Tortoise . You will have your own favourites.
It is entirely possible that neither your teacher nor mine mentioned that the stories are at least 2,500 years old and are of Greek and sometimes ancient Egyptian origin. Our teacher almost certainly didn't mention that they were translated into English. Almost all of you are aware of that now but how many of us were aware at the time. I certainly was not. Why, we had English hares and foxes and crows and tortoises! And, after all, they are speaking in English, aren't they?
So, just as the Bible deluges English culture, language and literature, so the vast hoard of classical authors stream through introducing a whole pantheon of people (gods, or demi-gods, mythical or of historical significance) that are constantly on our tongue-tips: Zeus, Hercules, Achilles, Helen.
The deeds of people acting out their lives and history at a very distant point in time, frequently in languages that do not survive, live in our lives.
Is not the Trojan Horse as real to you and I as it was to those who the dire warnings of Cassandra ignored!
Translations, in all their sweated awkwardness brought these delicately threaded tapestries to our shores and wove them permanently into our storehouse of stories.
And ever since then the tales of Ovid and of Homer get re-translated afresh every 10 or 20 years or so, a new generation of readers is introduced to these extraordinary tales with a mint-fresh translation.
But, just as with Aesop, Ovid and Homer, Cicero and Virgil inspire writers in English.
Derek Walcott and Ted Hughes and many others in the present time take the stories from these ancient sources and make them their own.
Thus we are enriched in a double sense. Not only do we have Homer's Iliad and Odyssey but we have Omeros of Derek Walcott and Tales of Ovid from Ted Hughes. Neither Hughes nor Walcott are attempting a translation but rather creating a new work based on the source material.
Is not our garden made multiple with all this splendour? Is not all this truly something to celebrate?
Translators are the ships of Columbus' come to tell us of new worlds. But what new worlds!
The Complete Fables
The Odyssey
The Iliad
Metamorphoses
The Love Poems
Heroides
The Aeneid
Selected Works
Cicero: Selected Political Speeches
Tales from Ovid
Omeros
Malcolm wrote: "Translators are the ships of Columbus' come to tell us of new worlds. But what new worlds!"Couldn't agree more. Translators are rock stars.
Tonight, I thought I would leave a more homely piece. Just added some new translated books to my "to read" section.So, may I pay tribute to Jimmy for starting this group. I searched high and low on the internet and found very little.
I haven't really dove in among you all yet. Still, it feels very good to be in company of like lovers of translated literature.
Once again, a huge thank you to Jimmy.
Thanks to Jimmy for starting a blog like this. This particular thread is specially appealing and some of Malcom's posts have been fascinating.For me, English is a second/first language and yes I grew up speaking at least three or four others. So translation is the name of the game.
I have actually read all of Beowulf in my own translation (assignment in graduate school) as well in Seamus Heaney's and John MacNamara's editions.Beowulf: A New Verse Translation The McNamara one, published as a B&N Classic is by the same person who directed that graduate seminar.
I wholeheartedly support this group's goals and invite you to take a look at my blog: http://semiophile2010.wordpress.com
A key focus of that blog is to bring the work of a marvelous 15th century Indian poet to the attention of people like you. It's an attempt to give you glimpses of the work and then hope to draw you into wanting to learn more about the author and his work. Feedback from this group's members will be highly appreciated.
more to come (only if you all are interested.)
You joined! Welcome, semiophile2010. Thanks for your comments. Appreciated.
Mentioned in the discussion below:The Translator's Art, edited by William Radice and Betty Reynolds, published by Penguin, in particular the essay contained therein: "On Translating Sanskrit Myth." by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty,
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, published by Harper
The Tale of Sinuhe: and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems 1940-1640 BC, Anonymous, translated by R B Parkinson, published by Oxford University Press
Since the readers of this group are interest in translated literature, I though I might share with you a book I very much enjoyed. Those of you familiar with Penguin Classics may well know who Betty Radice is. If you are a member of this group and not familiar with Penguin Classics, then quickly toddle out to your nearest bookstore and remedy this unintended lacuna in your education.
The book is The Translator's Art, a series of essays printed in honour of Betty Radice, and published by Penguin in 1987. Copies are available at Amazon for less than five bucks, and, since available there, will be available elsewhere.
Not all of the essays will be agreeable to each reader's taste. And, if I give a sample, then I am sure to skip the ones that would appeal to you.
The essays are very much in the spirit of the introductions which preface every Penguin Classic which is to say they are intelligent and lucid without in any way being scholarly. They engage the reader in a dialogue. Not the flaunting of erudition common among scholars.
I think that the value of reading two or three of the essays comes from a deeper understanding of what a translator faces when he or she tackles a work from a time and place distant from ours (although contemporary works can pose equal challenges).
One then returns to translations with a more informed eye (and ear, since the aural is being invoked by the speaker or speakers on the page).
Since I am not familiar enough with the tastes of the group, I thought to share with you one essay which I found particularly appealing. It is appealing because the author is quite frank and forthright about the difficulties faced by a translator.
So, the essay I have chosen from the The Translator's Art is Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty's "On Translating Sanskrit Myth."
Now it only seems fair, since I am going to be quoting quite a bit of O'Flaherty's essay to say who she is.
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty was born in 1940 in New York and trained in dance under George Balanchine and Martha Graham before gaining doctorates in the literature of India from Harvard and Oxford.
OK, if I get too technical, give me a nudge.
Let's start by calling her Wendy, I hope she will forgive me. Wendy says she faces three problems when she starts a translation. First is the problem of determining the language from which she will be translating, second is the language to which she will translate and third is the problem of the "role of talent" in the translating from the original to the resulting language.
What she says on the first problem is very interesting:
"If one cares enough about a text to translate it, one must believe that the text was composed by a human who used that language,... to express a human thought; and that any thought thought by one human being is capable of being thought by another human being; and that the task of the English translator is first to find that thought and then to figure out how one would have thought that thought in English."
Poses quite a few thoughts on our own part, not so?
One has to assume that a writer writing in any language has a clear idea of how he or she wants to convey that thought. But suppose the thought was not clear in the first place? No translator is going to be successful in translating a fuzzy thought. A number of German philosophers are famously obscure in their original. What Wendy says is OK at face value. A thought is a thought is a thought.
But where does that take us? Not very far.
For most of us reading for pleasure in the original language, when we meet a phrase (Wendy's thought) we don't understand, we can go back over it a few times and, if unsuccessful in discerning the author's meaning or intention, shrug our shoulders and carry on reading.
I suspect most translators can't do that. Does that mean that they have to know at all times what the writer means? Surely not. Many writers, when challenged, will say "I don't know what I meant. It says what it says." Ouch! Perhaps what Wendy means is that the translator has to have a sense of what the sense is. That makes more sense, if you see what I mean.
Take an example in English. Take a writer like Thomas Pynchon and his V.
I am not sure he is always writing for sense. I mean what can some passages of that book possibly mean? Is he not, at times, writing for effect? How does one translate that?
And yet there has to be something that we have not touched on yet. For, if we look up the sense of each word that does not necessarily give us the sense, the meaning in English, anymore that it would the translator when faced with the original language.
Now that was all a bit circular was it not?
I think the next passage I wanted to look at is quite the opposite and is, indeed, quite thrilling.
What Wendy next concerns herself with is what English can carry into the language and what it can't.
In looking at what she says, we get a sense both of what our language can, the one you and I are using at this moment, and can't do. Not all languages are created equal, at least they are not all the same.
Many writers have pointed out that English does not cope well with long compounds. Wendy quotes one writer who says:"the long compounds typical of Sanskrit appears ' even to some extend in English, where it is usually employed to gain a humorous or barbarous effect.' "
Wendy points out that only by using examples of the use of long compounds from the original could one convey into English something of the flavour of the original.
The introduction to a work could quite usefully be the place for such a discussion. She again quotes from her example writer who; " offered such a translation of one verse (' ..these soft-under-the-branches-fallen-flowers ..'), though he regarded it as to be ' so literal as to be almost unintelligible' ".
I am reminded of the introduction to The Tale of Sinuhe.
I should pause for a moment, for if you do not know this work, then I would highly recommend it.
http://www.amazon.com/Tale-Sinuhe-Egy...
The Tale of Sinuhe is too important a work to not discuss fully and I go all quivery at the prospect. Suffice for now to say that the work is from the 20 century BC. That is it is 4000 years old. The work is recorded in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The challenge to the translator is many-fold. He or she has to transliterate the hieroglyphics and then translate the language, Akkadian or Egyptian, into English.
What reminds me here is that Parkinson, in his introduction to the Tale of Sinuhe gives a sense of the thought pattern of such early languages.
"These soft-under-the-branches-fallen-flowers" is the sort of expression that one comes across in discussions of the translation of ancient Chinese or Japanese.
When you first come across it, it seems very strange indeed. But after several encounters, the realization dawns that poetical thinking was common in previous times and that thought in our time in quite prosaic.
Is it not for these realizations and awarenesses that we read translations?
The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems, 1940-1640 BC
The Translator's Art: Essays in Honour of Betty Radice
Gravity's Rainbow
The Tale of Sinuhe: and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems 1940-1640 BC, Anonymous, translated by R B Parkinson, published by Oxford University PressAgriculture lies at the bedrock of what we view as civilization. In fact it forms the basis for every civilization that ever existed. And many civilizations have gone and no longer exist. As will our own in time.
Agriculture is so important to a civilized society that it is surprising that it is not taught more widely. Actually, I should correct that. It is not taught at all as a general subject. Yes, agronomists and the like study it. But the likes of you and I never have been, and, as a consequence, something so fundamental to our well being and so foundational to society, we take completely for granted.
Consider agriculture for a moment, if you will. Agriculture comprises essentially two activities: plant cultivation and animal husbandry. With each, humankind has, over the millennia, engaged in a vast Darwinian process whereby we have domesticated plant and animal species to best adapt each species for our purposes. True, with the agricultural revolution we mechanized both.
The domestication of animals is fairly straightforward: herding, birthing, and pasturing being the main activities, along with warding off prey, providing shelter during inclement weather, and guarding against disease. Animal husbandry on its own does not necessarily make for a civilization. In fact, it simply moves a group from being hunter-gatherers to pastoralists. And pastoralism, as a way of life, does not necessarily mean settling in one place, the absolute central feature of a civilization. On the contrary, the herders can migrate with the animals to and fro from winter to summer pasture grounds.
Plant cultivation, on the other hand, is of a different order. Land has to be occupied that is suitable for a particular crop. The land has to be cleared and prepared. Tilling, planting, weeding, harvesting and storage all have to follow each other in a carefully controlled sequence. The seasons and weather are of prime interest. Thus time is a controlling and ruling factor. Natural disasters and disease are a constant menace. The zodiac became a carefully observed calendar for the agriculturists.
Animal husbandry is not labour intensive, plant cultivation is. Animal hubandry does not require a settled existence, though it may. Plant cultivation absolutely does.
Soil depletion, climate change, such as that arising from a river course change, or being forced off the land by invaders may, in turn, force a search for fresh arable land. But plant cultivation absolutely requires a settled existence.
The adoption of plant cultivation forces on the adopters a dramatic change of life style, from one of constant movement as hunter-gathers or animal husbanders, perpetually following the food, to a sedentary way of life tied to the vagaries of crop production.
A whole series of artifacts, changes and events are required to bring about successful plant cultivation for a community.
Crops have to be carefully hoarded to guard against future crop loss due to weather or disease. A surplus of crop is a basic requirement. Who says how much surplus and who safeguards that surplus?
Each member of the community growing his or her own crop is not an effective use of the land or of production. The idea of communal effort comes into play, as does labour specialization. Then, how is the crop distributed? Weights and measures are required.
To avoid the problems of monotony of diet and of mono-crop production, multiple crops will be cultivated or exchanged with adjacent communities. Trading by means of barter or money occurs. A value is attached to each crop which will vary based on supply and demand.
The crop counters and weighers in highly successful communities, that is ones with large or vast crop productions, will become specialists.
And here we come to why this essay has started by looking at agriculture. Because the demands of agriculture led to writing.
To be sure, writing at first restricted itself to the creation of crop lists and the careful recording of surpluses. But crop production itself led to an enhanced vocabulary.
The language and writing that Sinuhe uses {The Tale of Sinuhe: and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems 1940-1640 BC, Anonymous, translated by R B Parkinson) grew out of just these developments.
Not all neighbouring communities were necessarily crop producers, and therefore did not need writing. But humans are great imitators. When London first introduced traffic lights in the 1920s, the idea spread quickly throughout the land and elsewhere. The ARPA-Net became the World Wide Web.
Neighbouring communities adopted the writing of another group, adapting it to meet the consonantal needs of their own language.
Writing began as signs and symbols but evolved into a cursive form to offer greater flexibility, and to reflect the language it was being used to express.
Archeology has dug up the past for the better part of two centuries, beginning in a systematic way with Napoleon in Egypt.
But archeology does not tell us from the remains how the people were. Bogman (Tollund, Denmark, 1950) and Iceman (Schalstal, Austria, 1991) cannot speak to us, however well preserved they are.
But Sinuhe is building himself a tomb, he tells us in The Tale of Sinuhe. And, since Sinuhe's tale is autobiographical, why should we not believe him?
Imagine then, if we found the tomb. If we found the man. We can match man and voice. We can hear and see Sinuhe tell his tale. After 4000 years teller and tale are united.
The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems, 1940-1640 BC
I am not given to gushing but I do like to share enthusiasms.I recently sent an email to a friend and thought, since it gives kudos to Goodreads and to this group, I would share it.
"... and to alert you of the readers' group I joined, Lost in Translation at Goodreads.
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/3...
Goodreads has a huge number of reading groups on its site and there is sure to be one that will appeal to you. The site itself is very matter of fact.
The site has some phenomenally talented members:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
I like the group I have joined. They don't gush and they are not frantic. In fact, they appear to be serious readers. It is a quiet corner in a noisy world.
I must say that tremendous comfort comes from going on a reading site and finding a number of readers reading, for example:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23...
Frankly, it is thrilling. Try it yourself with a favourite book:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22... "
I considered posting this comment at some other place on the site, but thought better of it. I like that this area of Goodreads is low key.
Books mentioned below:"On Translating Sanskrit Myth," by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, in The Translator's Art, edited by William Radice and Betty Reynolds, published by Penguin, 1987.
The Tale of Sinuhe: and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems 1940-1640 BC, Anonymous, translated by R B Parkinson, published by Oxford University Press, 1997.
The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind , by Julian Jaynes, published by Houghton Mifflin, 1976.
The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer (no particular editions)
During the course of writing the piece on Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty's essay, "On Translating Sanskrit Myth," I mentioned The Tale of Sinuhe.
Some themes from a book I had read many years previously resonated with what I was saying about The Tale of Sinuhe.
So I thought I would go back and revisit the book, The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes, published by Houghton Mifflin, 1976, to explore those resonances and see if there was any substance in them.
Reviews of Origin are at:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22...
Many readers on this site (Goodreads.com) have written excellently on Origin (or TOoCitBotBM as one reviewer coins it, which, if you are English and enjoy word plays, sits nicely in the mind) so there is little point here in discussing what Jaynes says, or is trying to say.
It seems sufficient to say that Jaynes' book remains controversial (which I was quite unaware of when I read it).
There have been many controversial psychiatrists and psychologists over the years. Jaynes occupied a field that seems to thrive on the stuff. His ideas are substantial enough, though, for a Julian Jaynes Society to survive him.
What I am concerned to do is to go back to Jaynes and see if his thoughts throw any light on the language that Sinuhe uses (or on the thoughts Sinuhe used to frame the language, to borrow from Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty in "On Translating Sanskrit Myth" ).
We can do no better, in an effort to capture the sense of Sinuhe's language, than look to Parkinson's translation of The Tale of Sinuhe.
In his introduction, Parkinson says, "Egyptian literary texts exhibit various distinctive features: .. they are self-conscious and concerned with self-definition and expression ... they are fictional." [p3] and, again, the extant literature " ... provides a unique record from Ancient Egypt of man's self-consciousness and his exploration of the problematic reality that faced him." [p17] Parkinson then goes on to observe this is what makes Ancient Egyptian literature attractive to the modern (he means present day) reader.
If you are familiar with Jaynes book, you will have already spotted what caused the resonances in my mind with that work and Sinuhe's writing.
Yes, it is that word, "self-conscious".
When I first read The Tale of Sinuhe I was certainly struck by the writer (Sinuhe)'s self-consciousness. But there are so many strange elements to cope with on a first reading, place and people's names for example, that one keeps thinking, "This, after all, was written 4000 years ago, what do you expect?"
Parenthetically, one might add, that the atmosphere one gets from reading Sinuhe is of an alien place and of an alienness. Just the atmosphere that good science fiction writers strive to attain.
Anyway, diving into Jaynes, who has thoughtfully provided us with two excellent indices, one on places and the other on subjects, off we go.
Before we look at what Jaynes' says about literature, which is why we are here in his book, let's quickly look at what he says about consciousness. After all, he is bound to say something, no?
"Conscious mind is a spatial analogue of the world (he means physical world) and metal acts are analogues of bodily acts." [p66]
You don't have to be a non-Lockean to pick holes in that, but this is not the place to do it.
He then goes on to claim that consciousness is based on language, "Consciousness comes after language." [p66]
That may be the case, but what Sinuhe tells us, loudly and clearly, is that consciousness absolutely predates writing. Why do we say that? Because there it is on the page. No translation difficulties, no transliteration problems mask that.
Alright, if you are perverse you can say, "but he is writing and he has consciousness, how do you know that his consciousness does not postdate writing?"
Because, in developmental terms, writing is about 4 hours old, and there is no way that Sinuhe developed his consciousness during those 4 hours. The pace of development of writing compared to the pace of evolution is supersonic jet to tortoise. Sinuhe's predecessors (and ours) had to have developed consciousness a considerable length of time before writing was developed.
Put it this way. To give some sense of the difference of time scales we are considering here, consider how long it takes to learn how to ride a bicycle compared to the time taken for us to evolve from quadrupeds to bipeds.
The point is that, like learning to ride a bicycle, writing, even the development of it, is an acquired skill. The evolution of consciousness is of a whole different order. This may be what is wrong with Jaynes thesis, but I don't know for sure.
Putting all of Jaynes aside to return to the world of Sinuhe, what is left to consider?
However alien is the world that Sinuhe describes, the one thing we have no doubt about whatsoever is that Sinuhe is human (even in spite of his name).
In the chapter subsequent to that just quoted from, Jaynes examines his theses with regard to the Iliad.
I think it is very interesting to have Jaynes' comments on the Iliad (and the Odyssey, though we won't get to them) at hand because his comments apply to a work which most knowledgeable people agree was written around 800 BC.
In other words, long after Sinuhe had committed his composition with stylus to papyrus.
What's more, by every measure, the Iliad is the written record of an oral precursor. Sinuhe composed his from his mind onto the page.
Let's see what Jaynes says.
Well, boys and girls, men and women, we are going onto thin ice at this point. The section in Jaynes I am looking at is "The Language of the Iliad." [p69]
Jaynes is (or was) a psychologist not a scholar of Archaic Greek, the language of the Iliad. By what authority does he challenge generations of Greek scholars in the understanding of the Archaic Greek of the text?
I don't have that authority but I will look at the Greek terms he challenges and see how they stand up, always bearing in mind that the language we are considering, Ancient Egyptian, is of considerably greater antiquity than Archaic Greek. Consider, for brevity's sake, one example from Jaynes.
Now bear with me, (if you have borne with me so far,,,) the HTML of the web page may not support what I am about to do, but I think that you, reader, and I, writer, will find it instructive.
The first word Jaynes considers is ψυχή [p69] (we will for ignore the utter irony of him, a psychologist, talking unselfconsciously about this term).
Now, even if we are unpracticed at this, we can take the individual syllables and transliterate them.
The first letter is psi, the second is upsilon, the third is chi, the final letter is eta. We can render this psyche. Perfect! You all did very well!
We have rendered a word from 800 BC intelligible to us.
OK, this does not make us translators of Archaic Greek (after all, the Greek I have shown is, strictly, modern demotic Greek) but what it does show is that the Greek, however old it is, is deeply embedded in our language. Psyche is readily understandable to you and me.
Now, what ancient Greeks understood by the term and what we do, aye, there is the rub. But let's persevere.
A glance at the reproduction in the link below will illustrate for us the final eight lines of The Tale of Sinuhe.
http://www.britishmuseum.org/images/p...
The glance is sufficient to illustrate the point.
Ancient Egyptian is a whole order of difference away from us than Archaic Greek.
We have just transliterated the Greek into English. Here is an example of transliteration from the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics:
ink Smsw Sms nb=f (I was a follower who followed his lord) line 5 of The Tale of Sinuhe, see:
http://www.rostau.org.uk/aegyptian-l/...
Now, this is just an example. But this example from Tale of Sinuhe illustrates perfectly what Egyptologists do to the hieroglyphics before translating the transliteration into English.
So, what point am I making? That the language of Homer (whether he existed or not) is incomparably closer to us than the language of Sinuhe.
Yet Jaynes denies to the Greeks of the Iliad what Sinue has more than a thousand years before them, consciousness.
This is like saying: birds lost their ability to fly but later recovered it.
Now we are not engaged in an exercise whereby we determine how many legs of a thesis you have to destroy before it collapse. Rather what I set out to do was to examine the resonances I experienced in the previous discussion of The Tale of Sinuhe with regard to Jaynes' obviously seminal work.
Can I tie the resonances I experienced to my reading of The Tale of Sinuhe? No, I can not.
So what I, we, have learned is that my previous understanding of his thesis does not stand up to present scrutiny. The failure is mine not Jaynes, or anybody else's.
But I wouldn't have embarked on the exercise if I hadn't thought it was worthwhile.
After all, not all thought experiments are going to be successful. Better luck next time.
What we have ended up with, dear reader, if you stayed the course, is a deeper understanding of the nature of translation and of the transliteration of culture.
We are deeply connected to the language and ideas of the Iliad and the Odysses. They are implanted within our culture. We are surely dislocated from the world and culture of Sinuhe. That we are able to make any kind of leap at all to an understanding of his world is cause for joy and celebration.
Where this tiny pip of understanding will lead us to next, I cannot say.
With bated breath I say, stay posted.
The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems, 1940-1640 BC
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
The Translator's Art: Essays in Honour of Betty Radice
The Iliad
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Links to three posts initiated by the discussion in this blog and posted on Oct 31,2010:http://semiophile2010.wordpress.com/p...
Comments anyone?
Translators will seek to bring the all the glories of a literature not in English to our tongue, including, for most languages and cultures, humorous works. But, do those glories include nonsense literature?Many languages, outside Spanish, including English, have, over the centuries since it was written, hugely enjoyed Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote. (1605-1615)
His horse's name, Rosinante, does not translate outside Romance languages (taking away the suffix, rosin means nag, and also ruffian or peasant) but the name is a byword for broken horses. His faithful, but exceedingly dull servant, Sancho Panza, is a figure of fun in any language. The don's name itself has entered English to describe a particular behaviour or gesture - quixotic.
The translation of humour in literature seems worth touching upon. However, this is only a mild diversion on the way to considering nonsense in literature. Does nonsense even exist outside English? We will find out shortly. As an enticement, we'll travel to lands where tigers once freely roamed and ghi is still made. Along the way we'll meet some Pythons and even some slithy toves.
But first, let's explore what translators have brought us from the rich store of other languages for us to laugh at, and those difficulties they might have encountered in the process.
Humour divides into two form; verbal and visual. Of the two, visual humour surely translates more readily than verbal. One thinks of M. Hulot's Holiday
http://www.criterion.com/films/360-m-...
or Trafic (Traffic), by the same film maker, Jacques Tati.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069400/
Or of the Katzenjammer Kids, created by a German Immigrant, Rudolph Dirks, starting in 1901, which employed a peculiar German patios. Neither the films of Tati nor the comic strip of Dirks needs much help from language. The humour is primarily visual.
Or take Noises Off by Michael Frayn, which started life as a play and was later made into a film. The basis of the play is a farce in which a great deal of confusion reigns between characters who continually emerge and reemerge from countless doors in the stage set. Frayn's genius with this play, after the first act, is to swing the stage set round so that back stage now faces the audience. Our point of view is changed: we now watch what we have just watched from the font, to what happened behind the scenes. In performances of the play I have attended the lines that actors speak are completely lost in the gales and roars of laughter from the audience. The actors could be speaking any language you like, the play is still uproariously funny.
Similarly, French farces work well on English speaking audiences, even in French. Especially farces by Georges Feydeau, the master French farceur.
In this Goodreads group we are concerned about what gets lost in translation, and humour is perhaps the earliest casualty, that which gets most lost in translation.
It would not be fair to talk about unintended humour in translation without giving an example. If I don't, I run the danger of sounding like of those academic papers about humour, where laughter is the very last thing you will hear from the reader, far less a chuckle. But hang on for a moment.
Now we are not talking of unintended humour resulting from mistranslation, or, in the case of product brands, an unintended effect in the translated language. The example I have chosen is instructive because here we have two cultural sets of humour in collision. In the article linked below, from the Guardian newspaper, Stuart Lee, a stand-up comedian, talks of the difficulty of being funny to Germans and of his perplexity at German humour.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/...
The most visible examples of unintended humour in translation is in English language signs offered as a guide to tourists visiting the host country. The example that follows is from the War Museum on the River Kwai in Thailand:
"The Museum is building now - sorry for the visitor"
Jokes may translate well or badly from one language to another. Not all jokes are as fortunate as the following one, which gathers up a pun not available in the original Russian.
"Excuse me, but could I see the messenger boy? I am his uncle."
"Oh, so you're his uncle, are you? Well I am sorry, but you're late. He has just asked for compassionate leave to attend your funeral."
The English teller will gain over the Russian by stressing the word "late". Puns are, of course, notoriously difficult to translate. And English abounds in them.
There are likely to be funny books written in almost all the languages of the world. Laughter is universal even if what is found funny by one culture is not found the least bit funny by another. (see Stuart Lee, above)
You will notice among the books I own a series of fictional books by Stephen Clarke with titles centred around the French epithet "merde":
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10...
Observe, if you will, how few of the Goodreads reviewers mention finding the book funny.
I cite this example because it is hard to imagine a book, which explores and exploits every possible French stereotype the English possess, (Americans don't have any, France was ally during the revolutionary wars.) being translatable. Improbable though it seems, the book has been translated into French.
http://www.amazon.fr/God-save-France-...
I have no idea what this says about the French. They have an appetite for Francophobe humour? It is viewed by them as a fine anthropological study a la Claude Levi-Strauss? One reviewer is so angry that she borders on the ungrammatical with the title of her review: "profondément indigent et facile". It will help my American readers if I say that the French are not that thrilled at vast numbers of English repatriating to France since the completion of the Channel Tunnel. And for any English person to make fun of French food.. the English with what they call their food!
A famous joke has the French as cooks in Heaven and the English performing this task in Hell.
With the Merde book I have taken an extreme example, for sure. But, without going into elaborate explanations, it makes several important points about the translation of humour.
There are plenty of examples of successful translations of humorous literature. Plays provide one set of examples.
The Greek comedic playwright, Aristophanes, wrote his play "Birds" around 411 BC, in which two of his characters, Euelpides and Pithetaerus, middle-aged Athenians, have the following exchange:
Euelpides, "... Clearly, there are some birds about here. We shall soon know, if we kick up a noise to start them."
Pithetaerus, "Know what you can do? Knock your leg hard against this rock."
Euelpides, "And, if you use your head, we'll double the noise"
Pithetaerus, "Well then, use a stone instead; take one and hammer with it."
Euelpides, "Good idea!"
He does so.
Any play, no matter when it was written, requires the considerable skills of a director and some actors to bring the play to performance. And, as we have previously noted, old stories get refreshed by retellings by new authors. Here is Gwendolyn MacEwen's modern adaptation of "The Birds." (1993)
She substitutes X and Y for the two middle-aged Athenians of Aristophanes.
X, "... We are getting warm, brother. There are birds around here somewhere. We gotta make some kind of noise to stir them up."
Y, "Why don't you kick the rock, friend."
X, "Why don't you bash your head on it, friend, its thicker."
Y, "Oh, shut up, let's get a stone. We can bang on it with a stone. "
X, "A sound idea!"
He finds a stone and he and Y bang on the rock alternately.
In Moliere's The Would-Be Gentleman (1670), M Jourdain, a plain but wealthy merchant, employs a rather unscrupulous character, Dorante, to raise him (Jourdain) to the manners of the nobility (this is prior to the time of the guillotine). He is greatly impressed to find, courtesy of said Dorante, that he (Jourdain) is speaking PROSE, no doubt along with a distinct lightening of his pocket book.
end of part one - continued below
part two - continued from aboveIn transitioning from our consideration of visual and verbal humour to talking of nonsense literature, we can take it that nonsense will not work visually with some exceptions.
The "Ministry of Silly Walks" sketch by Monty Python works as an example of visual nonsense, but no other example occurs to me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqhlQf...
But the same group's "Dead Parrot" sketch would not work without the words. In fact the sketch works perfectly well without any visuals at all.
http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/mo...
Either way, with or without the visuals, it is an example of nonsense.
What do we mean by nonsense? No better way to make the point than by illustrating it. Take the same screwball comedy team, Monty Python (if you grew up with them, you know most of their skits by heart):
"Hallo, Mrs, Premiss."
"Hallo, Mrs, Conclusion."
"Busy day?"
"Busy? ... Just spent four 'ahrs burying the cat."
"Fooour hours?"
"Yeh, wouldn't keep still, wriggling ahbat."
"Oh, dear. Well, it weren't dead, then?"
"No. But he hasn't been very well cat recently. An' seeing as we are going on our 'oliday, me husband sed we should bury him, jus' to be on the safe side."
Since I was wrong footed about the Merde book and its translatability, I won't venture as to what is possible with this piece. What I can say is that this is a fine piece of nonsense in English. And perfectly identifiable as such. The English language has a long, proud history of including amongst its finest productions that of nonsense.
I will mention a few and you can fill in the rest: Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, T S Eliot, James Joyce ...
I am not going to dwell on translation of nonsense literature out of English. We might collide with the term dreaded by all translators: untranslatability
Let's settle instead by considering the following lines, where the Jabberwocky is speaking in Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll, 1872:
"Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe."
We can argue later whether translations of this have been attempted and into which languages.
What I want to do instead is ask: what other cultures produce perfectly sensible, intelligible stuff like this? And the answer is not a riddle, but it could be one if you want it to be.
The Tenth Rasa: an Anthology of Indian Nonsense, edited by Michael Hayman with Sumanyu Satpathy and Anushka Ravishahkar, published by Penguin Books India, 2007.
Now, what on earth can I say about this book?
Quote the blurb on the back of the book? Note that the material is drawn from 17 languages across the Indian subcontinent? That the first author entry is Kabir? (1440-1518) Kibir? The great Kibir wrote nonsense?
Here is the second stanza from Kabir's Sabda 52:
"An elephant's chained to the foot of an ant,
a sheep has pounced on a wolf.
A fish has leaped from the tide
to build a hut on the shore." [p5]
How about Sukumar Ray? (1887-1923) And the closing lines of "Mister and Misses Owl"?
"All my fears, all my woes
All my throbby sobby lows,
Are all forgotten thanks to you
My darling singing Owleroo,
Moonbright beauty, sweet as sleep.
Your nightly songs, they make me weep."
What about "Dead Can Dance" from Bauddhayan Mukjerji (1973- )
"No reason for rhyme to make the dead dance in time
Tararumpumpum to the beat of a drum
We dance old and young our song is being sung
Feathers outspread on the riverbunk bed
A grasshopper skip-hoppity hop
Dances for joy non-stoppity stop."
An anthology like this cannot be read at a single sitting but must be returned to and savoured like soft, sweet wine, sipped slowly, rolled round in the mouth, the aroma inhaled steadily before the first sip. And when the glass is quaffed and good conversation come to an end, the bottle is carefully corked, to be opened again and savoured again. Tasting each time better than it did before.
Machael Hayman's blog on the book is at:
http://tenthrasa.blogspot.com/
The Jabberwocky riddle, by the way, is this: how many English poems are embedded in the Jabberwocky's stanza quoted above?
Malcolm wrote: "British. The original language of the British Isles. If any trace of this language remains, no convincing case that I know of points to it.Romans. They bring Latin which drowns the existing language.
Anglo-Saxons. Many forms of a Germanic tongue arrive to largely supplant Latin. Not enough written forms of the language survive for us to say much. At heart ours is an Anglo-Saxon language. The Anglo-Saxon kernel remains.
[...]
The next biggie, the juggernaut, is Norman French (1066 and all that)."
You have some of this potted history a bit skewed.
Firstly, British does survive. Not very much in the English language (although I would be frankly astonished if there were not some words with British/Welsh origin current in English today), but in Welsh, and until fairly recently, in Cornish and Manx as well. Latin did not 'drown' British, the Romans merely started the process, completed by the Anglo-Saxons, of pushing British speakers into the westerly corners of the country (what became Wales and Cornwall). Besides, when the Romans left in 410 the Britons left behind were not all speaking Latin! The Anglo-Saxon invaders did much more to stamp out British in England than the Romans did.
The Roman occupation itself had a surprisingly small impact on Britain - when the Romans left they took their language, and their technology with them. A few stayed in Britain, of course, but not enough to change the everyday language. When the Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived they were met not by a Latin-speaking population, but by a British/Welsh speaking population, the élite of which could maybe speak a little Latin, but not as their native language. Latin largely entered the English language later through the church and academia, being the language of the learned/clergy class, and indirectly through French.
Second, you missed out a massive contribution! The Danes, the Norsemen, popularly (although largely inaccurately) referred to as the Vikings. They settled in the Northern part of England in huge numbers, leaving a massive Scandinavian influence on our language, especially on Northern English and Scottish dialects but also on what became standard modern English.
Below is the first half of a post "On Fiction and Nonfiction", at Where To?While not directly about translation, the discussion clearly indicates the difficulties a translator will face when translating a work of fiction.
Put aside, for the purpose of the present discussion, fiction's use of plot, character, style, setting, and all the other elements used by fiction, save one, meaning.
Meaning in fiction can be grasped at a superficial level based the words and terms being employed. The words and terms used fall into two categories: the dictionary definitions of words and terms, and historical, mythical, religious and cultural references.
A good dictionary will immediately solve problems of vocabulary. A word used in a particular context by the writer might not make its meaning immediately clear. The dictionary should solve that.
Historical, mythical, religious and cultural references are more problematic. The use of a particular reference, of what ever kind, by the writer, may be overt or it may be illusional. Overt references are there on the page, such as the phrase the Jazz Age. References by way of illusion are more problematic. The context of the story might suggest the setting for the illusion. or an earlier, more overt reference in the same work. The writer may betray a fondness for certain kinds of illusions, say biblical. The writer will be relying, for the most part, on the reader's knowledge to understand what is being alluded to. This reliance may be as simple as a knowledge of the writer's previous works.
The use of references, either direct or indirect, is one of the strengths of fiction. The use of references deepens meaning and moves the text away from the merely literal.
References are only one means by which fiction invests itself with meaning. Fiction also uses metaphors and symbols. Metaphoric language, the use of figures of speech such as symbols and metaphors, divides, just as with references, into the overt and the not so overt. Symbols are overt. This doesn't mean that you will spot that a writer is employing a term as a symbol. The word cross, for example, has a literal meaning, with crucifix being a close synonym. In addition to using the word in a literal sense, the writer may be employing it in a symbolic sense, and here we have a pointer as to how religious, cultural and other references are placed, or embedded, in the work.
Metaphors, and all of the other figures of speech, are less obvious. In fact, the strength and skill of a writer will rest with the ability to use metaphors, an other figures of speech, appropriately and well. Metaphors work by comparison. Fragility, for example, if compared to the murmuring of a breeze will suggest one thing, but if compared to a twig, will suggest something else.
A tale teller will weave a story out of warp and weft. The warp of a tale consists of the elements we referred to in the first paragraph: plot, character, and so on. Weft, the references and the metaphoric language, provide the riches of the story, emphasising its resonance with the reader. Quite simply, this resonance is an emotional appeal. But an emotional appeal that is subtle. Subtlety is what metaphoric language is all about.
The understanding of the metaphors and symbols may not be immediate. Firstly, metaphors and symbols may be used as public metaphors and symbols, those used by society at large, at least in the society in which the writer is writing, and accepted by that society’s members and readers. Or the metaphors and symbols may be private; in other words, particular to that author. In either case, the meaning of any metaphor or symbol may only be apparent from its context, and its repetition in different contexts. Or its employment may be so slight as to render as uncertain whether it is there in the text at all.
The art in fiction comes from the skill in applying effects to the story that work. Figures of speech, as already mentioned, will frequently be used in fiction and their meaning may be implied rather than spelt out. If implied, then interpretation will come into play: “This is what the author means, or intends to mean …” A number of interpretations may be possible and the author is only one possible source of interpretation. If living, the author may, or may not, be able to say with any certainty what he or she meant in a particular phrase or passage.
Summarizing what we have said so far, fiction seldom has direct literal meaning. Understanding may be gained unconsciously or subconsciously, and such understanding will be difficult for a reader to convey to others, even to those who have also read the work in question.
In fiction, meaning is often suggested rather than made plain. The fiction may be said to have layers of meaning that may be penetrated only by repeated reading. Good fiction is said to be that fiction which rewards successive readings.
At the heart of fiction is understanding. A book, story, or passage may be read and understood but its full meaning may not be immediately grasped. This may not be essential to the enjoyment of the work. If fact, some works may require successive readings to fully penetrate in terms of meaning. However, for most readers, a single reading will reward sufficient meaning for the work to have been successful in its impact on the reader. The measure of certain kinds of fiction is this ability to reward successive readings with greater and greater penetration of meaning and of understanding. This is what we usually mean when we speak of a work of art.
Hello, my name is Tara. And I doubt I could be as articulate (or eloquent) as Malcolm, so I will try to keep my answer simple. I love to read, and I don't want to discriminate against a book based on the language it was originally written in. A foreign author allows a reader to see the world through new eyes. I speak only one language, so I'm dependent on translators to give me access to that experience.
There's also something lovely about the collaboration between the author and his/her translator. Someone told me recently that no one understands an author's book (or reads it as closely) as the translator.
When I was younger, I used to read translated books mainly because there was no other option - I'm from the Czech Republic and our literary production is neither big nor particularly good. Majority of books on our market are translations. Since I learned English well enough to read without problems, I've been reading the original versions when possible.
Now I'm a translation/interpreting student, so I've come back to reading translations, even though for a different reason.
Still, there is a plenty of interesting books written in languages I don't speak or understand, and then I read the translation.
I may be a little bit critical towards translations due to my subject of study, but honestly, I don't know how I would live without them.
Mod
What are some good Czech writers we non-Czech readers should check out (pun not intended, haha)?
And what are some of your favorite writers (Czech or non-Czech)?
Hi Jimmy and everybody,thanks for the warm welcome :)
In fact, I don't read many Czech authors, but I can recommend Jaroslav Rudiš for example, he's my favourite, especially his Nebe pod Berlínem or Bílý Potok - Alois Nebel. I also love poems of Vítězslav Nezval. Other non-Czech authors I frequently read in translation are Olga Tokarczukor Peter Hoeg.
Hello all, my name is Tobias and I'm Czech as well.Before I managed to learn English and German well enough to read non-translated literature the reading of translations was the only way possible to broaden one's horizons beyond the *native* literature. It was a joy nonetheless; back in the day the translations were regarded as brilliant pieces of work. I remember reading perfectly translated Tolstoy, Gogol, Tolkien, de Exupéry...Nowadays the situation is a little bit different. With so many non-Czech contemporary literature the amount of translations being done is so high and so hasty that one can spot a decrease in quality of translations. And of course, translation can rarely improve poorly written original...
Hello everyone,My name is Jenna, and I'm a poet, so I approach the issue of translation from a poet's perspective. Poetry in languages other than English has always served as an inspiration and a catalyst to English-speaking poets. A famous example, of course, is John Keats, the English poet whose worldview was turned upside-down when he first encountered a beautifully written translation of the Greek poet Homer. T.S. Eliot forever changed American poetry by allowing himself to be influenced by the French poet Jules Laforgue. There was even a time when John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, arguably the two most important American poets of the late 20th century, wearied of contemporary English-language poetry and turned to the French literary world for inspiration, a breath of fresh air. For all these reasons, I am deeply invested in reading and supporting poetry in translation.
The American poet Jack Gilbert once wrote the following lines: "No person is educated who knows / only one language, for he cannot distinguish / between his thought and the English version."
And poet Elena Schvarts opined, "It's crucial for poets to read outside their own language...with a book of poems on one knee and a dictionary on the other.... I would argue that a poet who has never translated a poem is going to write uninformed poetry."
Recently, I started attempting to produce my own poetry translations, an experiment on which I reflected in my blog post here: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
My philosophy regarding translation is arguably unorthodox, and I'd love to hear your responses to it, especially if any of you are also poets first and translators second.
Warmly,
Jenna
If I'm interested in people and their lives, it seems simply logical to meet such people who live in other languages and cultures by reading, when I can't always meet them in person.
Beginning to translate such voices was simply a way for me to learn more about what is involved in this business of reading a "translation".
Beginning to translate such voices was simply a way for me to learn more about what is involved in this business of reading a "translation".
Loosed in Translation
Books mentioned in this topic
Nebe pod Berlínem (other topics)Bílý Potok (other topics)
The Complete Stories and Poems (other topics)
A Flea in Her Ear (other topics)
The Birds and Other Plays (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Olga Tokarczuk (other topics)Peter Høeg (other topics)
Vítězslav Nezval (other topics)
Halldór Laxness (other topics)
John Arthur Thomson (other topics)
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Hi I'm Jimmy. I am dead bored of American and British lit. Not that I know everything there is to know, or that I never read it anymore, but I feel like there is so much more going on outside of our language, and I feel like their concerns are more in line with my concerns (don't ask me what those are, exactly, haha). Some of my favorite foreign authors include César Aira, Robert Walser, Tove Jansson, and Thomas Bernhard.