NYRB: The Translation Paradox
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/03/15/translation-paradox-quality-vs-celebrity/
All this is understandable. Who wants to be the spoilsport to stand up and say that many pages of the Zibaldone were miserably translated and that to an extent the project was a missed opportunity? But I believe the question goes deeper than this and is perhaps symptomatic of the time we live in and the diminishing importance of the written word, and in particular of literature, in our society. Simply, many readers, many critics, don’t notice. Or if they do, don’t particularly care. They read for content. The clamor of idioms about us has become so loud that we hardly notice when a translation, or indeed any piece of prose, is cluttered with incongruities. In fact, the writer whose work was above all an achievement of style and linguistic density, an exploration of what could be done with the language, directed at a community who could understand the nature of the experiment—Joyce, Woolf, Gadda, Faulkner—is largely a creature of the past. And where, as in the case of the Zibaldone, the reader or critic finds sentences that are unreadable and quite likely skips or abandons the book, they imagine that this is because the original was of this nature and the translation necessarily impenetrable. They may even admire the translator for having got it into English at all.
Comments
There are three of these articles on translation, and they're awesome! Everyone go read them right now.
Eric Abrahamsen, March 17, 2016, 5:15a.m.
Except what he says about translators' royalties is patently wrong.
Lucas
Lucas Klein, March 19, 2016, 1:32a.m.
I believe he used the phrase "vast amounts of money" in conjunction with translators' royalties. That was the one big WTF in this article, for me.
Someday I may earn out my 1% on one of the books I translate, but I'm not holding my breath.
Eric Abrahamsen, March 19, 2016, 1:23p.m.
Russell Valentino writes:
it makes it sound as if royalties for translators are something virtually unheard of except among the nonsensical German translators association. This is simply not true ... In fact, there are many different ways that translators are compensated for their work, royalties among them. (How much, or rather how little, literary translators tend to make is another question, one that renders the “growing rich” part of Parks’ claim above at least as suspect). But even more disturbing is [that it] implies that translators of literature are only ever motivated by how much they receive in compensation for their work ... This is as strange a claim to make for translators as it is to make for authors, neither of which is so one-dimensional a body as to be purely defined by the bottom line."
Lucas
Lucas Klein, March 20, 2016, 12:28a.m.
All three were a great read. And it looks like the debate is getting heated: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/03/28/primo-levi-minefield-an-exchange/
Kristen, March 29, 2016, 10:04p.m.