Translation III

[Saurio]

Not to go on making big fuss about it but.

Another Vineland example I recently detected:
Deleuze and Guatari appear in Vineland as authors of The Italian Wedding
Fake Book, right? Since in my two previous readings of Vineland I wasn´t
aware that these two guys were real writers/philosophers this name-dropping
passed me by.
The other day, reading an essay I downloaded ("Cultural Trauma and the
´Timeless Burst': Pynchon´s revision of nostalgia in Vineland" by James
Berger) I found this reference and went to my Vineland copy to see it. To my
surprise it wasn´t translated as EL FALSO LIBRO DE BODAS ITALIANAS (which is
the literal translation) but as MANUAL SIMPLIFICADO DE BODAS ITALIANAS
(retranslated: "The italian wedding simplified hand-book").
I guess it needs no comments.

Of course, this (and the other two examples I gave) doesn´t seem to be
something to exclaim "The Whole Meaning of Vineland is Lost!", in fact I
read Vineland twice ignoring this cultural reference and nothing happened.
Or, it doesn´t add too much how the Hendrix song is called if the link
hendrix-vietnam is still intact, or how you call Big Foot.
The thing is that with all these "moles" (there´ll be more onwards, I quit
in in chapter 6) you begin to  feel suspicious of every word.

BTW, the only Pynchon novel my wife read is Vineland and she disliked it.
Maybe it could be because, ok, Vineland is not Pynchon at his best, but most
of it (I guess) is because of the translation.

What angers most is that Tusquets is a great publishing house, with "big"
authors on it (Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Cioran, Boris Vian, Marguerite
Duras, Umberto Eco, John Updike, to name a few), that published everything
of Pynchon (the official publishers of Pynchon in spanish, they seem), whose
books are rather expensive and the quality of its editions is over the
standard.
I mean, they are not "cheap" books nor, as JP points, their translated books
hit the bookstores before the original. In fact, it took aproximately two
years since Vineland appearance in english and its spanish version (taking
as true the copyright notice of 1990 by Thomas Pynchon, February 1992 by
Tusquets).
To put it in the other way: If my edition of GR has a lousy translation it
is OK: it´s a cheap edition (I got it for 2 or 3 bucks), it is badly binded,
Grijalbo wasn´t a wow! publishing house (mostly best-sellers alla Harold
Robbins), surely they got it published thinking it was a war novel, you
know.

As to end: Is funny that Purple Haze is translated (and using a word I guess
only sailors use) and So Lonesome I Could Cry (when Zoyd goes to Log Jam,
first pages) isn´t. The translator could had had an unified criterion!

It will continue?

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                              SAURIO
                     saurio at cvtci.com.ar
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