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> Everybody admires his extremely deep knowledge of the Italian language and its nuisances, I would even dare to say "unrivaled" in our present day. I always f
by Chathamization 10y ago
> Everybody admires his extremely deep knowledge of the Italian language and its nuisances, I would even dare to say "unrivaled" in our present day.
I always found it strange that in the U.S., conversations about, say, Foucault's Pendulum, don't really touch on the fact that people are reading a translation and not the original work. The vast majority of the readers probably wouldn't even be able to tell you the name of the translator.
I always wonder how different the translation is from the original, and how different it would be from other possible translations. I remember looking at different translations of Lysistrata and feeling like they were almost completely different plays.
- ShaneWilton 10y ago> I always wonder how different the translation is from the original, and how different it would be from other possible translations. I remember looking at different translations of Lysistrata and feeling like they were almost completely different plays. There's a great Radiolab episode that covers exactly that: http://www.radiolab.org/story/translation/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/translation/ I'm reading Foucault's Pendulum right now, and even though I'm absolutely loving it, part of me feels like I'm missing out by reading a translation. The other part of me wonders whether those who read the original work missed out by not reading this translation.
- fenomas 10y ago> part of me feels like I'm missing out by reading a translation In general I often feel the same, but in this particular instance it might make you feel better to know that William Weaver's translations are widely lauded. Eco famously said Weaver's translation of The Name of the Rose was "much better than the original". :) And I've always found it pleasing to wonder if that might not even be true. One thinks of a translation as being necessarily inferior to an original, but depending on the two writers involved, there's no ab initia reason why it might not be better (for some given definition of "better", anyway - clearer, more accessible, more profound, etc).
- harperlee 10y agoWell I can easily see how great translators, could improve on top of the shoulders of another author's book. Particularly if you start with a book centered about plot, structure, and other "macro" properties of good literature, and apply an author that excels on the "micro" structure part. Jorge Luis Borges, or Vladimir Nabokov, with their great command of vocabulary, come to mind. They are also great authors that dealt with several translations. Borges, particularly, stated that translations could improve the original, and modified his translations where he deemed appropriate.
- rjsw 10y agoMy copy of Foucault's Pendulum doesn't even name the translator, I had similar thoughts to you on reading the first comment and had a look. A contrast is with the works of Stanislaw Lem, all the English translations were done by the same person.
- maxerickson 10y agoThe translator[1] was apparently pals with Eco and translated several of his books. I got curious and ended up finding a paywalled diary of his experience translating the book[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Weaver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Weaver [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/43470168?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/43470168?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...
- sobbybutter 10y agoWeaver did excellent translations for much of Calvino's work, too.
- Kristine1975 10y agoNot paywalled. You have to create a free as in beer account, then you can read 3 articles every 14 days.
- johntb86 10y agoThere have been several different translators for Lem. Michael Kandel, Louis Iribarne, Jean-Michel Jasiensko + Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, Marc E. Heine, Barbara Marszal and Frank Simpson, and probably others. Of these, Michael Kandel seems by far the best.
- CamperBob2 10y agoEco would probably point out that even a work in its native language is a translation of a deeper language inaccessible to all but the writer.
- johngossman 10y agoWhether he said it or you did, that is a really lovely statement
- justinlardinois 10y agoI always wonder about this too. Sometimes you get lucky and the original author translates it themselves (Waiting for Godot) or there's a translation that's endorsed by the author. But other times the best you can get is a widely-accepted translation, and even that's not always enough to assuage any fears that you're missing sometime. I do think it's funny when the translator makes a point of shitting on other translations in the foreword. I think the version of Aristotle's Politics I read in college did that.
- npsimons 10y agoI really can't tell for certain, but I feel fortunate that Michael Kandel translated Stanislaw Lem's works; they read so well to me, I can't imagine them not being what the author meant. The fact that the poetry in "Cyberiad" works so well (in English) makes me feel he's a good and honest translator. You're right on Eco, though: I can't name the translator for Pendulum.
- johngossman 10y agoFunny. Lem, Eco are the two I always wonder about re: translations, because of their wit and wordplay. And of course all poets
- e12e 10y agoI would add Murakami to that list. In my experience, Japanese doesn't translate all that well to English - although some Murakami's works, like "South of the Border", feels very close to Fitzgerald. I'm now a little surprised to realize that "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" was actually written before both it, and "Norwegian Wood". At least for "Norwegian Wood", I found the translation to Norwegian to "feel" better than (the excerpts I've read) of the English translation. It's hard for me to say if that is because Norwegian is my first language, and I learned Japanese from living in Japan, or because there are some parallels between terse Nordic prose and poetry and Japanese. I could certainly see the Nordic sagas working "better" in Japanese than in English.
- scarmig 10y agoTranslator, traitor; or translator, trader? Check out Douglas Hofstadter's essay on just this topic.
- mathattack 10y agoThis was the essay that got me thinking about translation not being a 1-1 exercise.
- aardvark179 10y agoI would also recommend Eco's own Mouse or Rat: Translation As Negotiation.
- ZeroGravitas 10y agoHe has a full book on this subject too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot
- mathattack 10y agoFor better or worse, anything sufficiently subtle or complicated can't be translated 1-1 across languages. There are too many problems of context, meaning, etc. For a strange example - the Intuit have 50 words for snow. How much subtlety would be lost translating that into English? It just wouldn't work. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there-really-are-50-eskimo-words-for-snow/2013/01/14/e0e3f4e0-59a0-11e2-beee-6e38f5215402_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there...
- ryanklee 10y ago> have 50 words for snow Untrue, but widely circulated and accepted myth [0] [0] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4419 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4419
- mathattack 10y agoFair enough, but the point still stands. Languages don't map 1 to 1.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoI guess if you live in SV you might not have direct experience with this, but English has a lot more than one word for "snow".
- johngossman 10y agoIn Seattle we have 50 words for rain
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoRain, stupid rain, fucking rain, miserable rain...
- jtolmar 10y agoIn Seattle we have 50 words for surprise at the lack of rain.
- carlob 10y agoIt's funny you should mention translations as different: when Umberto Eco translated Queneau's Exercises in Style he had to rewrite more than a few. Many would consider all translations of that book as rewritings, new exercises. Some don't even have the same number of pieces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercises_in_Style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercises_in_Style
- Cyph0n 10y agoAs a Muslim, I've noticed the same when it comes to the Quran. People think that they've read the Quran when in fact a large of its beauty is in the structure of the Arabic text.
- rangibaby 10y agoI would say that is like the difference between the KJV and other translations of the bible. KJV is just plain wrong a lot of the time but the writing is very good.
- jankins 10y agoUh...no, it's like the difference between the original Greek/Hebrew and the translations.
- duaneb 10y agoThere are many reasons to read the Quran aside from aesthetics. But I wholeheartedly agree.
- huxley 10y agoGood interview of William Weaver in the Paris Review which discusses some of his early days as a translator in post-war Italy: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/421/the-art-of-translation-no-3-william-weaver http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/421/the-art-of-tran...
- tikhonj 10y agoI had this brought into sharp relief recently when I was reading Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (which has become one of my favorite books, coincidentally). There was a passage about how the "formal you" became an "informal you"—something that doesn't happen in English. This passage, no matter how it was translated, would inevitably be jarring in English in a way that it wouldn't in Italian or even when translated to some other language which also makes that grammatical distinction. Not that I'm complaining: if anything, it fit perfectly in a book as meta as If on a winter's night. It certainly made my experience deeper. But it also made it different than it would have been in other languages which makes you think...
- derefr 10y agoI think, asked to make that translation, I'd have resorted to making all the characters in the play say "thee" and "thou" at appropriate moments, just so I had something to talk about.
- filoeleven 10y agoYou may be interested in Douglas Hofstadter's writing about translations of the poem Jabberwocky in <em>Gödel Escher Bach</em., excerpted here (at least in part, I thought there was more in the book): http://www76.pair.com/keithlim/jabberwocky/poem/hofstadter.html http://www76.pair.com/keithlim/jabberwocky/poem/hofstadter.h... It's interesting how translators decided to handle a poem that consists of so many nonsense words that are meant to evoke specific ideas in an English-speaking reader.
- jhbadger 10y agoIn general translators are almost anonymous, but actually in Eco's case, the translator of FP and many of his other books was William Weaver, who was kind of a "rock-star" among translators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Weaver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Weaver