Reseñas
There were a few essays which I thought became too pedantic or talked about a text without sharing enough of the translation for me to follow. For the most part, though, the essays were easy to read but thought-provoking and raised issues I thought were relevant to me as a reader of translations. The middle portion of the book discussed an incredible range of issues translators can encounter which never occurred to me before. Some of the questions I found most interesting were whether translators should prioritize capturing the feel of the work they're translating or the exact meaning and how translators should handle words without exact matches in the language they're translating into. The essays at the end helped me understand what motivates translators. An essay by Murakami about translating The Great Gatsby was one of my favorites from this section.
Even there were a few essays in this collection which I didn't enjoy, the vast majority were both intellectually stimulating and fun reading. I think reading these essays will make me a better consumer of translated fiction, more aware of how translating works and which parts of the original are likely to be preserved through the translation process. I'm also going to try to do a better job giving translators a byline on my blog when I read translated work, because good translators are often overlooked. If you're someone who likes reading translated fiction or are interested in how languages differ from one another, I'd highly recommend this collection.This review was originally posted on Doing Dewey.
There were a few essays which I thought became too pedantic or talked about a text without sharing enough of the translation for me to follow. For the most part, though, the essays were easy to read but thought-provoking and raised issues I thought were relevant to me as a reader of translations. The middle portion of the book discussed an incredible range of issues translators can encounter which never occurred to me before. Some of the questions I found most interesting were whether translators should prioritize capturing the feel of the work they're translating or the exact meaning and how translators should handle words without exact matches in the language they're translating into. The essays at the end helped me understand what motivates translators. An essay by Murakami about translating The Great Gatsby was one of my favorites from this section.
Even there were a few essays in this collection which I didn't enjoy, the vast majority were both intellectually stimulating and fun reading. I think reading these essays will make me a better consumer of translated fiction, more aware of how translating works and which parts of the original are likely to be preserved through the translation process. I'm also going to try to do a better job giving translators a byline on my blog when I read translated work, because good translators are often overlooked. If you're someone who likes reading translated fiction or are interested in how languages differ from one another, I'd highly recommend this collection.This review was originally posted on Doing Dewey.
There were a few essays which I thought became too pedantic or talked about a text without sharing enough of the translation for me to follow. For the most part, though, the essays were easy to read but thought-provoking and raised issues I thought were relevant to me as a reader of translations. The middle portion of the book discussed an incredible range of issues translators can encounter which never occurred to me before. Some of the questions I found most interesting were whether translators should prioritize capturing the feel of the work they're translating or the exact meaning and how translators should handle words without exact matches in the language they're translating into. The essays at the end helped me understand what motivates translators. An essay by Murakami about translating The Great Gatsby was one of my favorites from this section.
Even there were a few essays in this collection which I didn't enjoy, the vast majority were both intellectually stimulating and fun reading. I think reading these essays will make me a better consumer of translated fiction, more aware of how translating works and which parts of the original are likely to be preserved through the translation process. I'm also going to try to do a better job giving translators a byline on my blog when I read translated work, because good translators are often overlooked. If you're someone who likes reading translated fiction or are interested in how languages differ from one another, I'd highly recommend this collection.This review was originally posted on Doing Dewey.
There were a few essays which I thought became too pedantic or talked about a text without sharing enough of the translation for me to follow. For the most part, though, the essays were easy to read but thought-provoking and raised issues I thought were relevant to me as a reader of translations. The middle portion of the book discussed an incredible range of issues translators can encounter which never occurred to me before. Some of the questions I found most interesting were whether translators should prioritize capturing the feel of the work they're translating or the exact meaning and how translators should handle words without exact matches in the language they're translating into. The essays at the end helped me understand what motivates translators. An essay by Murakami about translating The Great Gatsby was one of my favorites from this section.
Even there were a few essays in this collection which I didn't enjoy, the vast majority were both intellectually stimulating and fun reading. I think reading these essays will make me a better consumer of translated fiction, more aware of how translating works and which parts of the original are likely to be preserved through the translation process. I'm also going to try to do a better job giving translators a byline on my blog when I read translated work, because good translators are often overlooked. If you're someone who likes reading translated fiction or are interested in how languages differ from one another, I'd highly recommend this collection.This review was originally posted on Doing Dewey.
"We believe that there is much to be found in translation, and much to celebrate. Translation not only brings us the work of those who write in other languages; it simultaneously reveals the limits of our own language and helps us move beyond them, incorporating new words, concepts, styles, structures, and stories. Thinking about translation means thinking about the gaps in our literature and our ability to communicate, revealed by comparison with the capacities of other languages and traditions of thought." p. xxviii
I read this book off and on over a long period of time and so some of the earlier essays in the book have not stuck with me as well as they should. In the first part, I found several particularly interesting, including David Bellos on "the paradox of 'foreign soundingness' "; Michael Emmerich on the complexity of translating Japanese into English, in an essay entitled "Beyond, Between: Translation, Ghosts, Metaphors"; Alice Kaplan on an experience she had with a French translator of one of her novels; and Esther Allen on the political history of four US translators of Latin American literature. Ms. Allen writes:
"I've sketched this thumbnail history in an attempt to show that any given act of literary translation is a product of unique political, linguistic, cultural, technological, historical, and human contexts. Translators, like authors, are the product of social structures and circumstances; translators, like authors, play a role in bolstering or challenging those structures and continually altering the linguistic and narrative tools brought to bear on them, as well as the attitudes and norms that produce them." p. 101
In the second section, several essays dealt with the challenges of translating poetry, and two with the special challenge of translating poetry from completely different eras (medieval and renaissance); I found these latter two somewhat technical and difficult to follow (perhaps because of my lack of familiarity with the languages/poetic forms from which they quoted). But I enjoyed José Manuel Prieto's essay on translating a poem by Osip Mandelstam into Spanish and one by Clare Cavanagh on translating contemporary Polish poetry, which also illustrated how Polish poets adapted originally English and French forms of poetry. She writes:
"Of course translating poetry is impossible; all the best things are. But the impulse that drives one to try is not so far removed, I think, from the force that sends the lyric poet out time after time to master the world in a few lines of verse. You see a wonderful thing in front of you and you want it." p. 244
In this second section, I also enjoyed Christi A. Merrill's essay on translating Indian stories in which the original folk versions were in a variety of Indian languages but the written versions were in Hindi; Jason Grunebaum's discussion of "Choosing an English for Hindi" when there are so many versions of English, including American English and Indian English; Haruki Murakami's afterword to his translation of The Great Gatsby from English to Japanese (and his great love for Gatsby); and Susan Bernofsky's essay on the necessity of revision after revision in translation and some particular challenges she encountered in her own work. She writes:
"Blocking out the rough contours of a sentence or paragraph is a preparatory exercise to hearing the text's heartbeat in the cadence of its phrases. To immerse oneself fully in the work of translation is to become a medium, transcribing a text that exists only as a sort of phantasm in the translator's imagination: the text that is just like the original but written in a different language. Revising means listening to the potential text, hearing it amid all the rhythmical detritus of inadequate versions." p. 229
and
"And the point of all this dogged labor and persistence? To give the impression of effortless-sounding rightness. Although the vision in revision implies something visual, revising has less to do with something seen than with something heard: the text's voice. Voice is the crux of all translating. p. 230
This book has a broad scope in terms of the issues it addresses, the languages the translators work with, and the literary forms they translate, and it has only increased my interest in translation. I have several other books about translation on my TBR shelves, and I hope to get to them sooner rather than later. By the way, I bought this book when another LTer mentioned it on her thread.
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rebeccanyc | 6 reseñas más. | Oct 11, 2014 |
rebeccanyc | 6 reseñas más. | Oct 11, 2014 | These essays focus on a diverse group of languages, including Japanese, Turkish, Arabic, and Hindi, as well as frequently encountered European languages, such as French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, and Russian. Contributors speak on craft, aesthetic choices, theoretical approaches, and the politics of global cultural exchange, touching on the concerns and challenges that currently affect translators working in an era of globalization. Responding to the growing popularity of translation programs, literature in translation, and the increasing need to cultivate versatile practitioners, this anthology serves as a definitive resource for those seeking a modern understanding of the craft.
Segnalato da Alice Gerratana
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There were a few essays which I thought became too pedantic or talked about a text without sharing enough of the translation for me to follow. For the most part, though, the essays were easy to read but thought-provoking and raised issues I thought were relevant to me as a reader of translations. The middle portion of the book discussed an incredible range of issues translators can encounter which never occurred to me before. Some of the questions I found most interesting were whether translators should prioritize capturing the feel of the work they're translating or the exact meaning and how translators should handle words without exact matches in the language they're translating into. The essays at the end helped me understand what motivates translators. An essay by Murakami about translating The Great Gatsby was one of my favorites from this section.
Even there were a few essays in this collection which I didn't enjoy, the vast majority were both intellectually stimulating and fun reading. I think reading these essays will make me a better consumer of translated fiction, more aware of how translating works and which parts of the original are likely to be preserved through the translation process. I'm also going to try to do a better job giving translators a byline on my blog when I read translated work, because good translators are often overlooked. If you're someone who likes reading translated fiction or are interested in how languages differ from one another, I'd highly recommend this collection.This review was originally posted on Doing Dewey.