Translation II: The Lizzard Boy keeps farting

[Saurio]

Hi;
I think (and a offlist post enhanced this belief) that maybe my complain
about VIneland translation wasn´t clear enough.

Let me try once more with a "translation" from english to english of the
traditional rhyme "Mary has a little lamb".
Which, as far as I remember (I learned it in 1974) it goes
    Mary has a little lamb,
    as white as snow.
My "translation" alla Vinelandish
    Mary owns a modest-sized ovine
    whose whiteness can be compared metaphorically with the colour of snow.

Get the point?
The meaning is (guess so) intact, but the reading is so akward it hurts.

A "good" translation is (imho) the one who is accurate to the meaning and
does little harm to the poetic (no harm is impossible, I know).
Let´s put this way. In a good translation the guy who stands between the
book and the reader had to be as "invisible" as possible.
This doesn´t happen in Vineland, which is, btw, the only Pynchon novel that
I haven´t read in english (my copy of GR is in spanish, but I first read the
novel in english - that´s how I met P.), so maybe there is some of my
discomfort.
And consider that I read Vineland twice and started a third, and in every
reading I had to stop (a very brief instant, yes, but I had to stop) in a
"weird" word and think what is the translator talking about, and then go on.
If this happens once or twice (or seventeence, if the neologism is allowed),
well, is part of the trade of reading translations, you tollerate the stop
(as it happens in GR translation). But if this happens (or you feel it
happens) in the whole body of the book, well, I think is logical to
complain.

Anyway, it was something that seemed untollerable enough in the third
reading, which I stopped for the "anger".

Believe me, reading it is akward, uncomfortable, you have to be too
interested (I wasn´t in this third time, I confess) to go on.

And this complain exceeds Vineland or Pynchon, is something I began to
perceive in the last years, as the editorial industry moved to Spain. Maybe
is a prejudice, but most of the translations of major publishers seem
without "soul", as if the translator is just an operary in an assembly line,
converting words from one language to another and not caring that there are
more "spanishes" than the one they speak in Spain.
Imagine, let´s say, a Garcia Marquez novel translated in the most rabid
upper-class stiff-lip British english and/or in a North Yorkshire low-class
dialect. How could be the reception of this translation by, let´s say, a New
Yorker? I guess that it could be "not pleasant".
Maybe this example is a little bit exaggerated, but this is the spirit of
what we argies sometimes feel, like that we have constantly to "retranslate"
from spanish to spanish while reading.

But, let´s don´t go on further. It was just a trivial, funny comment, a FYI,
a Do-you-know-that, nothing worth more fuss.

And, of course!, I had already ordered Vineland in Amazon.

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                              SAURIO
                     saurio at cvtci.com.ar
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