Books in Translation
 

In light of our little forum book club and its first novel of discussion, "Dead Souls" by Gogol, I wonder, what are some general thoughts on novels in translation?

I see the merits of reading translated novels for plot or 'entertainment' purposes, but as far as literary criticism/deconstruction/dissection, I consider the aforementioned activities pointless in regards to a novel not being read in its original linguistic context.

In my humble opinion, so much of a novel is comprised of its syntactical nuances, its vernacular, its sentence construction, its character dialogue, that its translation is more of a bastardization. While it's presumptuous to think that every writer takes advantage of the aforementioned tools for the purposes of conveyance, it's an affront to disregard such pains, and a majority of the value of the work is lost.

What of Hardy's romanticism would remain after translation? Rushdie's cynical verbosity? Salinger's dejected minimalism? Not to mention the influence each's geographical roots have had upon their word choice and expression.

To me, translation is a tool of convenience and accessibility. If I don't speak the language a book is written in, it is my loss, and to digest it in any other form in hopes of dissecting it is an insult to myself and the author.

Thoughts? Comments? Dissenting opinions?

Sidenote: Pompous, high-browed, obscure, anally retentive literary references are wonderful, when they are relevant to discussion. They are not so wonderful when put forth to engorge one's perceived intellectual resume.

One need only read the subtitles in any Hong Kong film to affirm the correctness of your position.

This thread is giving me the horn already but i have to go now.Truncated i salute you for starting one of the kind.

here's my first salvo: without translation, most of the world would be reduced to intellectual provincialism. would you have ever read homer, or the bible, or plato & aristotle, or the tao te ching an i ching and the yoga sutra or the kama sutra or the epic of gilgamesh? and that's just antiquity, and it's just for starters...


for the most part it's true; however, just like a movie can on occasion be better than the original book, there are times when a translation can surpass the original. i'll ofer an example in a moment.


in that case a translation should be an invitation to learn a language. i set off to learn english in earnest when i started reading ulysses in spanish and i found i didn't like it-- i knew the verbal potency was lost, i bid my time, and when i finally arrived to the source i didn't dip-- i splashed and dove and drank until i was sated.


yes but your choice of authors is limiting.


why then not just limit yourself to read midwestern contemporary authors?


plenty :)


ok here is my translation story.

i'm waiting for someone & decide to go into a bookstore. browsing though the books in spanish, i find this thing called "por el amor de pedro infante". sonorous, musical, campy little title ("for the love of pedro infante"-- he was a mexican movie star of the... 50s?)

so i start reading: it's the most colorful, hilarious, horny, insane book i'v seen in ages. i keep readinng, enthralled. but it's time to go! so i ask the bookstore guy about it; the woman who wrote it gave a reading there, signed books, etc. and then he tells me-- it's a translation! i look, and sure, there's a whole TEAM of people who went into writing it. so of course, fool that i am , i buy the original-- which was selling for $5 while the spanish version was $15 (i had to go the dentist so money was short).
when i get home, i open the book, and what do i find? a dissapointment. a chick book. a bland, boring narrative of a single woman in a border town. gone was the lush color of mexican slang, the outrageous expressions, the verbal fireworks. the book was called "loving pedro infante" -- you gringos see any music in that? no... i realized then that the translators were much better writers than the author and had surpassed the original version by light years by injecting it with verve and virtuosity and sheer street poetry.

do i want to limit myself to the particular province of my particular time and place? do i want to limit my culture to my place in the calendar, to my genes, to the politics of identity, to my insufficiency in other languages? no! no! no! i am too much of a glutton for that.

translation however should be in the hands of poets and poets only, because only they can recreate the peculiar magic of a language, for a different time and place, or create a new sort of magic.

and on that note, i will never speak or read russian, but i can say guerney is a bona-fide provider of linguistic delights, even though he wrote his translation in 1942 and this is 2006, and, oh, can you say "horse's twat" these days? ha ha hah... i found that in a chapter yesterday. i wouldn't waste my time in any of the rat's ass translations i've seen elsewhere though.

--
im in a meeting. i might have fouled up somewhere but i'll reserve the right to edit later.

Pompous.

it's not my fault i'm perpetually engorged :D

dubbing too, I can't count how many times i've seen the guy on screen still talking after the dub has finished and instead of just leaving it silent you get some stupid "AHAHAHAHAHAHA" manic laugh or a "eh?" I'd love to see a Wong Kar Wai movie dubbed like that

Yeah, testicular elephantiasis'll do that to you.

I read l'étranger as part of French Literature class at A level in both english and french. It was definately better in french

I also read quite a few Haruki Murakami books in english, since I can't read in japanese I don't know what I'm missing. the books are entertaining anyway

He's giving a look like "So what? Haven't you ever seen elephantiasis of the cock before?"

if you continue to hide your ignorance of the written arts by derailing a genuinely interesting discussion with pictures of my nutsac, then i'll teabag you to death :D

It really depends on the style of the writer. Salinger is lost on some people without even being translated.

you better be careful, he might call you a ninny.

I'm certainly not averse to reading works in translation in general; my point, which seems to have been lost here, is that while they can be 'enlightening' in a fashion, they are misrepresentative of the original intention of the author. While I may enjoy Guerney's talents of composition, they are entirely independent of the novel's 'value' in its original, unadulterated form.


See above. I maintain that the translation and the original work exist, while perhaps in tandem and with their own respective merits, separately from one another.


My point exactly.


They're examples, geek-boy. If you want to list every author in existence from 1000 B.C. on, have yourself a party.


Again, you're missing the point. I do not summarily shun works in translation; I do, however, acknowledge that my 'interpretation,' whatever its worth, will be flawed, and traitorous to the original intent.



To reiterate my point, while I can appreciate the capabilities of a good translator, I won't read a translated novel with the same PURPOSE in mind. To restrict my example to the current issue at hand, Gogol, I feel it fruitless and, to a point, detrimental, to deconstruct the technicalities of his writing, because it is not Gogol's writing I am deconstructing. This does not preclude my enjoyment of his translated works on other, more superficial levels, but it does mean that I am ingesting a literary regurgitation, which, in the best of circumstances, is a diluted and presumptuous caricature of the essence of novel.

ok but what about the books. are we talking books or what? books!!!!!

---

oh, sorry-- i missed truncated's response-- my apologies

answer forthcoming.

Oh fuck it!I'll stay on for an extra hour.
Right,in regard to the subject we are meant to be discussing(teabagging?That deserves its own thread surely.),i just wanted to say that as a polyglot of sort bad translation irritates me more than pigeons in groups of more than ten.I've pretty much learnt(to an extent)to speak english by reading and reading alone while pondering about the meaning of any given word till i feel that i get the sense of it accurately right.Hundreads of subtitled movies later,i find myself the victim of many a nail on the face at the hands of bad translators of any sort.Good ones surely understand that words are more than mere things that come out of a person's mouth? Like an entire psychological apparatus that has its roots and its life within a human being or an artist's life experience for instance.

Also, English has SO MANY MORE words than any other language that the translator can choose many different synonyms and possibly twist the meaning in unintended ways.
Of course I have enjoyed translated works, but there are questions for sure.

porkie-- it kills me to no end when i see almodovar's verbal pyrotechnics turned into dull, informative one-liners in english. no puns, no joy, no hysterical playfulness. in kika, for example, paul bazzo's name was lost on most english speakers: polvo = sex act, polvazo = (azo = augmentative, therefore) "huge fuck"-- polvazo & paul bazzo are pronounced more or less the same... there are endless instances in every movie.

but on the subject of books: i have to write my reply to the internet temptress that started this thread.

Indeed Mr Savage Clone!

Which is precisely why a translation is, even at its best, doing a disservice to original.

The best writing takes pains to develop its own vocabulary, its own vernacular, its own textual cadence, its own VOICE. Faulkner, for example, employs stream of consciousness, and that, in conjunction with his typically Southern dialect, defines him as a writer, and imbues his tales with individualism. How can you translate Vardaman's nonsensical spewings of guilt, Jewel's stoicism, Dewey Dell's pathetic ignorance? One can create a linguistic reproduction, but such will serve only as informational, and is simply incapable of embodying the original in concentrate.

Some translations are poor, and some are exceptional; regardless, a translation simply, as the movie title so aptly states, loses something in the process.

Precisely!

Without a doubt.Loss is pretty much the formative stage of the translating process.You cut off a bit of the sadness,sarcasm,joy and psychological implications that belong to whole characters in order to pay tribute to the travelling word.But there are exceptions.Not many,but there are a few.

but ms. via negativa, while i concur with you to an extent, do you realize that without translation you'd get nothing, nothing at all, just the void? you're pointing towards a general problem of language, the problem of semantics, the need for hermeneutics, the gap that cannot be bridged between a mind and another, regardless of language, upon which countless postmoderns found their many solipsisms and nihilisms.

take EL QUIJOTE, or if you prefer the english tradition, HAMLET. do you think that you read it at all in the same way as an elizabethan, or a renaissance spaniard? in order to have "faithfulness" to the text you can only be shakespeare, or cervantes. and then!! is that what you wanted to write? or would you correct endlessly?

a different approach is to consider the text not as an "expression" of the author but as an object in itself, something like a rock, or a fossil that comes to life only inside each person's mind. and in that sense the "author" is also irrelevant, as are any intentions or desires on her part. there is only the text and you may do with it as you might.

but the truth, the truth is something in between, isn't it?


yes, of course, but the text itself, if you are looking for an "original," is also as elusive, if not so obviously so. it's a matter of degrees-- how far you are willing to go is a choice you have to make.

while i am positive that i'm not getting the whole deal when i read a work in translation, i do however approach it with joy. kinda like eating chinese food outside of china, or (in your case) thai food beyond thailand. is it to be shunned, bemoaned, despised? or enjoyed? i try to squeeze as much joy as i can out of life because, shit, i don't believe in the rewards of the afterlife-- it's now or never.


well, i pointed out that your selection was limited because those are very well-chosen authors picked to support your claims. i mentioned ,with a similar strategy in mind, ancient books, because most of us have read them only in translation (unless you're a 3000-year old sanskrit speaker.) and i hope you have at least read one a few of those. you'd be missing out otherwise. (i'm sure you have as you present yourself as a well-read person).


traduttore, traditore, i believe was coined by dante. it's a well known fact that translators must always chose, put in and leave out, betray in order to be faithful. this is no paradox. but then i brought up the whole problem of language and the "meaning" of the text before. we can't EVER get to the "original", whether it's the original papyrus or a 3rd-hand translation. still, whether in putting a book together or in translating one, there are serious differences in quality, and a good translation will manage to bring onboard a serious chunk of the original, which should not, cannot, be disregarded. (again the matter of degrees of-- separation?). limitations aside, reading should be fundamentally an instrument of joy, rather than tears (though some people can adeptly merge both). and again, i think the guerney translation is as joyful as a translation from an old russian book can get. which is why i read it in my hammock, even at the risk of falling on my ass (which is rather solid so i have no fear).


no, "deconstructing" perhaps is not a viable option here, but i think the irony of a description or the brilliance of a sequence of images can be transported by capable hands. there are more pleasures to be had with animals than taxidermy, don't you think?


honey is a regurgitation, and yet it tastes better than chewed flowers. if your aim is to analyze and dissect, you must study russian and russian history and read endless biographies and texts. if you aim however is literary pleasure, i assure you, with guerney you put yourself in very capable hands, and until you haven't read it you shouldn't prejudge, or you'll be missing out some worthy delights, and not those of caricature.

amen. i have spoken. now stop making lame excuses and get the proper book. :D

That was almost as long and indulgent as one of Faulkner's own sentences.

this reminds me of laila complaining about school :D

I cannot bite my typing tongue on this.

truncated asked an involved question & !@#$%! gave a respectfully involved answer, predicating his response with what amounts to a, although informal, very intelligent thesis statement.

I suppose all messages written here are supposed to be of the sarcastic sound byte variety or else suffer undue criticism?

I know I'm guilty of being testy & defensive far too often, but what the fuck?

I must not be communicating myself very clearly.

I'm not arguing against the existence of works in translation. I'm not contesting that translations can be enjoyable in their exclusive identity.

What I AM asserting is that, regardless of the capability of the translator, the original work, in its basest, even physical form, is mutated, and therefore cannot be deconstructed. This in turn robs the text of its inherent 'personality,' of what it retains of the author's identity.

You can assert all that abstract b.s. about text being inherently interpretive (which I agree with to an extent), but such does not negate the fact that ANY alteration of a written communication will, precisely BECAUSE of its microscopic and multifaceted intricacies, quite drastically mar its original conveyance, for better or for worse.

If I engage in a discussion on a piece of literature, it is not to appreciate its entertainment value, or to spout facetious, light-hearted commentary on its zany characters; I am literate and have average comprehensive capabilities, and can do that sufficiently on my own.

The purpose of engaging in such a discussion is, for want of a better description, essentially academic. For me personally, this is best achieved through a more technical yet all-inclusive approach, in hopes of encountering a perspective I hadn't yet been privy to myself.

In short, I can read dem words jest fine, y'all, and I do likes me a good story. But (and this is down to my personal taste), I like to pick a novel apart, examine it from all possible angles, observe how the mere conjoinment of two words can speak volumes within a sentence. I like to geek it up hardcore. And a novel in translation just isn't conducive to that.

So Guerney can kiss my provincial ass.

Far be it from me to speak on someone else's behalf, but I think that was mostly tongue-in-cheek.

Note of warning: I merely skimmed this thread. This is not as much for other people as it is for me to just kind of note my own thoughts, so I apologize if some of it has been addressed or only makes sense to me.

In my opinion, translation is an awful thing. It twists, distorts, augments, diminishes, and transforms the original text. Even if the translator is brilliant beyond comprehension, fluent in the exact language and dialects used in the book, from the times that they were written, and even if he injects a penetrating musicality into every word and phrase he picks (as, of course, Guerney does), it only becomes more the work of the translator - awe-inspiring as it may be. Nothing is able to substitute the original.

Using an example from the one of the only two other languages I know anything about (and that, very little), if you are to come across the phrase "zuki-zuki" in Japanese, you cannot effectively translate it into English. It is essentially onomatopoeia for the sound a sharp pain would make. In English, you would either have to make up a rather silly-sounding word, or simply narrate the feeling. Compound together countless problem of this sort, and you get quite a bit of difference in meaning. Also, authors, such as Homer and Dante, employ such astounding literary devices - acrosstics, meter, rhyme, etc. - that to attempt to emulate it would be useless, and more harmful than good.

That being said, it's absolutely necessary. I'm not going to learn Russian. Every time I read a translation I think to myself, "Man, I gotta learn this language. I feel like I'm being gyped." But I don't have to patience to learn a language simply to read a book in it everytime I want to read a translation from new language. I don't even have the patience to learn one.

I have a book on Biblical translation, and how the process works for such a highly regarded and linguistically fragile piece of work. It brings up issues such as figures of speech and puns that must be either ignored or changed. There is a line between accuracy in contents and accuracy in poetics that must be treaded very carefully.

Basically, I think the only thing you can do beyond learning the language is to read multiple translations, from both poetic and literal translators. We're really forced to be content with highly imperfect works.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the pieces are not worth reading. I would still encourage everyone to read a translation Homer regardless of how much it fails. It's just an incompleteness that we have to live with. I try not to let it bother me too much.

Atari:

I was just giving him a friendly ribbing.
I like to do that, and he gives it back. It's usually good times.

Well said, Lloyd.

oh you guys are kinda like gay cyber S&M fuck buddies then?

Everything's becoming so much clearer now haha.

He wishes.

ha ha ha i don't think it's a clusterfuck, more of a swingers situation :D

now i have to reply to ms. provincial... gotta get her off the tractor & reading some decent book translations.

Is that a sincere wish to broaden my cultural horizons, or an insufferable note of condescension that I detect?

You may join Guerney, if you wish.

...Anyway, he goes are you into s and m?
Could you like just picture me in like a leather teddy?
Yeah right, hurt me, hurt me...
Im sure! no way!...barf out! gag me with a spoon!...gross, I am sure, totally.
-Moon Unit Zappa (under Frank's direction),
Valley Girl from Ship Arriving too Late to Save a Drowning Witch...
It's a rather remarkable '80s gem & difficult to listen to just once without replaying it over & over. What a monster bassline!

I don't go in for S&M. I remember going back to this hottie's place once & she wanted to drink wine & play with each other while we stared into this huge mirror in her bedroom. So I, naturally, went along with that. Then she opened this huge drawer & had all this kink equipment & I'm afraid I didn't too get far along with her requests.

I realize there was a recent bondage S&M thread, but...

This friend of mine had a girlfriend once that he told me was into getting beaten forcefully. Well, I minded my own business until he told me about how he had been taking her to a public park & binding her to a tree & then beating the living shit out of her. I was taken aback by such an escalation of their little games & told him that it just wasn't right even if she did like it & that she needed mental help to which he responded that she had already been seeing a psychiatrist for years. About a year after that by a turn of events I ended up in this same girl's house late one night after she asked me to please help her retile her bathroom floor. Her boyfriend was coming in from out of town earlier that next morning, but after plying me with alcohol she made her move on me.

And?

i think you're doing ok...


well the thing is that their identity is not EXCLUSIVE. they have a referent. just like the description of a delicious food can make your mouth water, even though you can't eat the description. here it's language refering to language, and therefore there is something edible (in terms of language) that remains.

a great chinese food restaurant in new york might not be the same as a restaurant in hong kong, but you are eating chinese food after all-- in translation. you could argue "no, it's american, chinese-inspired food". sure, whatever...


yes, it's mutated no dobut, but you make it as if "deconstructed" was the sole thing one could do to a book. there are layers and layers of pleasure hidden, and some books survive it better than others. if your book is very close to its verbal structures (like joyce), the book is untranslatable. and yet i once met a chinese translator of joyce. he gave a lovely talk & explained his strategies. i don't want to sound like too much of an existentialist here but these heroic futile struggles can be a great source of meaning, much like in "the myth of sysyphus" by camus-- it's not putting the rock on top of the hill, it's the struggle that counts.

you know, as a bilingual creature i'm much more aware of the limitations of translation than a single-language person would be. there are so many untranslatable expressions i deal with every day, in both languages. i've even taught translation in college-- i'm very well aware of the limitations.

HOWEVER, or maybe *because of it*, i also know that translation can be a glorious thing. it doesn't 'rob" the author identity-- it preserves it the best it can for those who can't have it otherwise.

i worked on a translation of eliot's four quartets with a professor of mine-- a poet actually, not a real "academic". we went over and over and over it, never exhausting the possiblities, exploring multiple meanings, etc., and having to sacrifice many things-- but also preserving others. the man in question is the possessor of a great poetic sense and ultimately that is what counts-- it's his poetic sense, "channeling" eliot if you will.



of course i agree with that, that is however rather obvious and doesnt really merit discussion, does it? where i differ with you (and that's the important part) is in my orientation towards it-- i don't see translation as a worthless tragedy; on the contrary, i see it as a heroic quest-- doomed from the start, yet beautiful and worthy of admiration. i read books in the original whenever i can-- i've learned french also because of this, and i can manage a little portuguese and perhaps (perhaps!) some italian. but i cannot know every language and therefore i'm eternally grateful to those who've given me the gift of countless books i would not have been able to ever access otherwise.



i think there are many levels in a text, some of which survive translation better than others, and all can be a justification for a good discussion. the quality of the discussion however will depend on the participants rather than the subject at hand.



while all-inclusiveness is not possible in the context of this gogol reading, there is still the possibility of a very enjoyable exchange-- there is much that survives in translation from the original greatness, and therefore it must be devoured. much more enjoyably so if in good company. if you're chicken, then simply run; but i dare you to read a good translation and still make the best possible of the discussion.


oh, well, yes, not that. but again the poetry of a sentence is not ALL you can find in books. there are so many levels i would get tired of enumerating. by the way, characters can be a pretty interesting thing in a novel-- they are in many ways what is central to a novel and set it apart from other forms. i'm sure you have the intellectual resources to live up to other challenges as well-- don't sell yourself short; just try.


i'm sure he would love to if he could get under the tractor seat and wasn't possibly dead. :D

seriously, i hope you are not intellectualizing procrastination or making a baroque version of sour grapes, or looking for an excuse to avoid the pressures of a real-time discussion (hah hah-- yes im taunting). you're stuck with a dog, that barnes and noble thing. it's fucking horrible. get the right damn book. deconstruction or not, that guerney book is funny and delicious. D-E-L-I-C-I-O-U-S. like, hm, ersatz spring rolls. :D

...& nature took its course. I violated my hands-off policy that I try to live by when a girl already has a guy, but this particular vixen & I had an animal atrtraction to each other that went back to when she was dating my friend & I didn't know her current boyfriend at all. I guess she never told her him after the fact, which is a relief. Usually, they always tell sooner or later &, as one knows, it regrettably becomes this whole soap opera.

oh well, I just made the thread partially into a soap opera too...

I enjoy translations, no matter how altered they may seem from the orginal, with them new ideas can be introduced, and as someone said, we wouldn't be limited to provincial intellect.