A query on translation

[P. Chevalier]

I'll post you soon the actual french translation of the Kenosha Kid 
sequence... Totally absurd, impossible to keep it working; so un-funny that 
it becomes hilarious!

By the way, you miss a lot with Queneau, perec and Genet, but don't have 
any regrets for Houellebecq...



At 13:51 14/04/2003 +0200, Otto wrote:
>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