A query on translation

[Otto]

Yes, I've read all of Pynchon in both languages, much of Kerouac, much of
Salinger, "Heart of Darkness" by Conrad, Beckett's "Molloy," Achebe's
"Things Fall Apart," Toni Morrison's "Beloved," some novels by Salman
Rushdie, Lawrence Norfolk, Tolkien, Robert Anton Wilson. James Joyce of
course (the translation of "Finnegan's Wake" is an adventure in itself).

I've given up trying to read Laurence Sterne in the original. "Moby Dick" is
still waiting to be read in English. Same goes for the Franzen-book and most
novels by Joseph McElroy. Actually I'm trying to find a way into "Infinite
Jest" by David Foster Wallace where there's no translation available yet.

I still have the idea of trying the Dutch GR-translation one day simply
because Dutch is such a wonderful language. I've read "Max Havelaar" by
Multatuli in Dutch and German, the same with "The Sorrow of Belgium" by Hugo
Claus, Anne Frank's Diary and, the weakest, Jef Geeraert's "Black Venus"
(which I nevertheless absolutely recommend to anybody interested on colonial
studies, especially the Kongo, for it's relatively honest description of
Belgian molest & genocide).

A translation is absolutely & definitely a different text, and meanwhile I
prefer the original because it is nearly impossible to "get" a (fictional)
text really adequate into another language. I'm aware now that I miss a lot
in the cases of French (Camus, Genet, Perec, Houellebecq), Russian
(Bulgakow, Pelevin, Strugatzki) or Spanish (Garcia Marquez) written novels.

>From my reading of GR which I've read several times in English and only once
in German I believe that the original touches me deeper because I have to
think more about what is really being said. There are always things that get
lost. Until you check it yourself you can never be sure how "close" the
translation is following the original. A bad translation is an offence.
Sometimes it's useful to check the translation if things are unclear in the
original or to look up which solution the translator has chosen when I'm not
sure what is meant by the author. I don't translate in my mind when reading
a foreign text.

Maybe a translation is a more "shallow" reading, definitely (as you say)
less "intellectual" and more "direct," but I don't believe that it's
necessarily more "intuitive" and "intrinsic." You may get the words easier,
but what about the meaning? Isn't it the intrinsic level of a text that
relies on the word choose the most that suffers the most from a translation?
I think this happens a lot when language itself is the hidden topic of the
narration and the translator is unaware of this.

Worst case scenario:

"as the saying goes, an old woman always feels uneasy when dry bones are
mentioned in a proverb."
Chinua Achebe - "Things Fall Apart"

How to keep this "proverb in a proverb"-structure in a translation? We have
no such saying in German that would fit in here so the translators have
chosen the Christian "mote in the eye"-saying from Matthew 7 and Luke 6 to
keep the proverbial structure which gives the sentence a totally different
meaning, distorts it structurally and in what it says.

Otto

----- Original Message -----
From: "Cyrus" <cyrusgeo at netscape.net>
To: "pynchon-l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, April 14, 2003 12:07 AM
Subject: A query on translation
>
> If you don't mind, I would like to pose a question which has been
> bugging me lately:
>
> Have any of you read a novel both in the original and in (good)
> translation to your native language? Have you noticed any difference in
> the way you perceive the two texts? -- as if (forgive me for being
> simplistic) the translation addresses a "deeper" area in your brain? --
> as if your reading becomes less "intellectual" and more "direct",
> "intuitive" and "intrinsic"?
>
> Cyrus