Falen's Evegenii Onegin / khandra

[Deborah Hoffman]

Of course you are right on several accounts.  I wasn't
really trying to defend the translation on the round
that it was hard, only that it may well have been a
conscious choice from among several not entirely
satisfactory options (chondria would not have been my
choice either!), rather than a mistake in the sense of
incompetence.  Whether one chooses to err on the side
of reproducing poetic structure or reproducing exact
meaning could arguably be a matter of personal
preference.  Though I can certainly see where someone
with strong opinions falling one way or another on the
matter would view the other approach as a gaffe :-).

Now I really have to get my hands on a copy of
Faflen's translation, because the curiosity is killing
me!

--Deborah

> Date:    Fri, 6 May 2005 23:43:50 -0400
> From:    David Powelstock <pstock at BRANDEIS.EDU>
> Subject: Re: Falen's Evegenii Onegin / khandra
>
> Of course it's true that in translating one is
> always balancing a variety of
> factors, but that's no excuse for gaffes of this
> magnitude.  BTW, now that I
> remind myself of the stanza in question, Pushkin's
> narrator has already used
> "angliiskii splin" by this point and is now
> searching for a Russian
> equivalent.  Nabokov has, predictably, the utterly
> opaque "Russian
> 'chondria'."  (Honestly, if you're going to
> translate, translate already!)
> To call it "simply Russian ennui" ends up, in
> context, being silly.  Maybe
> "Russian gloom."  But this is an instance in which
> Falen has allowed the
> always tenuous balance of literary factors to go out
> of whack, sacrificing
> far too much syntactically to the other desiderata.
> My guess is that he
> would be glad to have it back.  All translators
> experience this at one point
> or another.  But to defend such a slip on the
> grounds that translation is
> hard is an insult to translators.  Better to change
> the line far more
> radically than Falen has in this instance than to
> propagate such a crude
> misanthropologism.
>
> My third and fourth cents,
> David
> (Powelstock)


Deborah Hoffman
Graduate Assistant
Kent State University
Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies

http://www.personal.kent.edu/~dhoffma3/index.htm

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