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this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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chapotraphouse
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This is surprisingly common, especially in poetry. They'll get a grad student to give them a literal, word-by-word translation, and they'll make it pretty and publish it as their own. The grad student is lost to history. WB Yeats's Sophocles renderings are another example.
How is that even real? A literal translation of poetry wouldn't convey half the nuance, that's how poetry works.
Right, they get someone else to provide the meaning, and they take care of the nuance. I think Pevear & Volokhonsky have a similar approach to prose. Gregory Rabassa, who most famously translated Gabriel Garcia Marquez, said that his approach to translation was "How would the author write this if they were writing it in English?", and you can see that governing philosophy in poetry all the time. Translations of Homer going from the Greek's dactylic hexameter to English's iambic pentameter, and that kind of thing. Or Ovid's The Art of Love, rendered in limericks.
That's what I mean though, if I'm reading Homer or Rumi or whoever else, I want to read their poetry, not some British academic's. I'm sure their translations are nice, but it might as well be a new work.
then poetry shouldn't be translated?
It should be translated by someone who speaks the language!
I will say that there's no such thing as a perfect translation, and if you really like works in a particular language, you should make an effort to learn it. There's no true substitute, although a good translator can get pretty close.
that's what wertheimer was explaining, a process where specialists from the language it's being translated into refine and format beyond what rote translation accomplishes. if the only acceptable person to participate is a bilingual poet we're not going to get many poetry translations. anonymous grad students that do the translation and such ought to be credited though
IMO The problem with good translation is that in order to do it right the person doing it has to have mastery of both the source and target language plus good understanding of the subject matter and knowledge of the terminology specific to the subject matter. Usually people with this much skill have better things to do so we're stuck with dudes like in this post just absolutely butchering everything.
i feel like that's the sort of person who could tell if a guy like barks is doing a bad job, we're just as amatuer. there's plenty people who might have the academic & language skills without the artistic chops for poetry or prose, and i don't see what's wrong with them collaborating with a creative type, to justify 'unqualified' people's participation & consulting in a translation process.
by all means this dude might be grifter and distorter or scummy about crediting who helped him but simply needling on qualifications instead of specific translations he made that are wrong and comparing those to correct ones is a weird way to approach the issue
A small group that's actually collaborating would be fine too, but it doesn't sound like that's what's happening.
I will admit to being a stickler for this kind of thing, though.
he worked with John Moyne (a translator) & some Sufi that lived in Philly, apparently. like some people with related expertise have measured criticism you can find, mostly about "secularizing" the original work, but the pidgeonholing based just on the language/educational pedigree is the very-online devolution of an academic debate
No need to be rude. The person at the top of the thread said it was usually an uncredited grad student doing the translation, and as someone who has done uncredited grad work in the past, I know firsthand how shitty that is and how mediocre the output tends to be. If that isn't what Barks is doing, good on him.
I think poetry in particular is heavily dependent on the specifics of the language being used, so it really is untranslatable more or less. Like puns but even more extreme. Whatever this guy is doing is just stupid and not even an attempt at doing it right tho lol.
Wait, what's up with Pevear & Volokhonsky? My understanding was that they are both bilingual, he a native English speaker, and she a native Russian speaker, and that they work together in an iterative process.
I really liked their translation of Anna Karenina, or at least I read it and came away thinking it's a great book, and so I have several more of their translations on my shelf which I haven't yet tackled....
From here. I think I've read interviews, maybe from earlier in their career, in which he downplays his Russian abilities a bit more than merely "not fluent."
U have no idea how deep of an internet hole I went down after your first comment, and so I have concluded that I want to check out these translations:
I simultaneously thank u & blame u for putting me to rethinking the Russian lit section of my bookshelf lol
I should read the Guerney and Fusso Dead Souls, too - I read the P&V and based on that and their Master and Margarita translation I think humor is their weak point. Speaking of which, if you come across a good translation of Andrei Bely's Petersburg, please let me know - the one I have (the John Cournos version) sometimes betrays that a joke has been translated, but never in a way that lets you know what was funny.
Janet Malcolm demolishes (somewhat unfairly) P&V: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina/ (Pevear responds)
Several years ago I developed a translation theory obsession, so a few recommendations from that binge -