![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jan. 30th, 2006 09:20 pmI am a moody, pmsy slug. But I have managed to refrain from being homicidal, so yay me?
Mostly by sleeping in insanely late, since I can't get to sleep until I've worn myself out. And I don't dare get online, because then I don't wear myself out and there is no sleep, but many shades of homicidal thoughts directed at my coworkers and the customers.
And I don't want to go to jail.
From a translation of Dante's Inferno, translator John Ciardi: When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same 'music', the same air. But it can only do so when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.
Language too is an instrument, and each language has its own logic. I believe that the process of rendering from language to language is better conceived as a 'transposition' than as a 'translation', for 'translation' implies a series of word for word equivalents that do not exist across language boundaries anymore than piano sounds exist in the violin.
The notion of word-for-word equivalents also strikes me as false to the nature of poetry. Poetry is not made of words but of word-complexes, elaborate structures involving, among other things, denotations, connotations, rhythms, puns, juxtapositions, and echoes of the tradition in which the poet is writing. It is difficult in prose and impossible in poetry to juggle such complexes intact across the barrier of language. What must be saved, even at the expense of making four strings do for eighty eight keys, is the total feeling of the complex, its gestalt.
Which is possibly one of the most beautiful and intelligent approachs to translation that I've ever seen, which is why I copied it by hand out of a library book I have long since given back. ^^
Mostly by sleeping in insanely late, since I can't get to sleep until I've worn myself out. And I don't dare get online, because then I don't wear myself out and there is no sleep, but many shades of homicidal thoughts directed at my coworkers and the customers.
And I don't want to go to jail.
From a translation of Dante's Inferno, translator John Ciardi: When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same 'music', the same air. But it can only do so when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.
Language too is an instrument, and each language has its own logic. I believe that the process of rendering from language to language is better conceived as a 'transposition' than as a 'translation', for 'translation' implies a series of word for word equivalents that do not exist across language boundaries anymore than piano sounds exist in the violin.
The notion of word-for-word equivalents also strikes me as false to the nature of poetry. Poetry is not made of words but of word-complexes, elaborate structures involving, among other things, denotations, connotations, rhythms, puns, juxtapositions, and echoes of the tradition in which the poet is writing. It is difficult in prose and impossible in poetry to juggle such complexes intact across the barrier of language. What must be saved, even at the expense of making four strings do for eighty eight keys, is the total feeling of the complex, its gestalt.
Which is possibly one of the most beautiful and intelligent approachs to translation that I've ever seen, which is why I copied it by hand out of a library book I have long since given back. ^^
