piatiknizhie in English Pentalogy

[Robert Chandler]

This is a truly wonderful story - thank you, Russell!

R.




> This kind of thing happens quite frequently in interpreting, where the
> rhetorical aspects of translating become especially apparent. The interpreter
> makes an assessment of the audience's willingness/ability to understand or
> accept something and shifts the mode of expression accordingly. The funniest
> example I've heard was from Esther Allen at last year's American Literary
> Translators Association annual meeting, where she told the story of a visit by
> Jimmy Carter to Japan. The audience laughed so hard at a joke he made that
> afterward he asked the interpreter what exactly she had said. Her sheepish
> reply was that she had realized she wouldn't be able to convey the humor of
> his anecdote adequately, so she had told the audience, "The President of the
> United States has just told a joke. Please laugh."
> 
> Literary translators often don't seem to see that they are engaged in
> rhetorical acts, too, gauging their audience and shifting the way they express
> themselves accordingly, and not just at the lexical or syntactic level.
> 
> Russell Valentino
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list
> [mailto:SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of Robert Chandler
> Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 1:35 AM
> To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
> Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] piatiknizhie in English Pentalogy
> 
> I think it is more than clear that Olga has made her choice 'consciously with
> an understanding of the implications'!  You seem, Paul, to be forgetting that,
> like most activities, translation can serve many purposes. I know one
> interpreter who was congratulated for her diplomacy after the successful
> performance of an opera.  The producer was, I think, Lyubimov;
> the orchestral conductor was  George Solti (I may have muddled the names).
> Solti told her that, but for her diplomacy (i.e. MIStranslations) the
> production would have fallen apart.
> 
> On one occasion Solti asked why Lyubimov kept using the word IDIOT so often.
> The interpreter sweetly replied that it was a Russian word meaning 'he/she is
> coming/going'.  Solti did not really believe this, but I think he was so
> amused and charmed that he did not continue the row with Lyubimov.
> 
> R.
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> Olga Meerson wrote:
>> 
>>> The translation is poor, of course, but the original locution is even
>>> "poorer". Pentaptych sounds perfectly adequate but doesn't make me
>>> any happier about the original expression. Sometimes a perfect
>>> translation lays bare the badness of the original, thereby expressing
>>> condescension--in this case, towards Russian colleagues who use a
>>> word in such a bad taste so liberally... I would opt for covering up
>>> for my colleagues' bad taste. Although neither ethnically Russian nor
>>> even a citizen of Russia, I feel somewhat patriotic when it comes to
>>> these matters. It is like covering up the body of Noah, if he happens
>>> to be your father.
>> 
>> Well, if you'd like to revise and improve the original, that's a valid
>> choice but one you should make consciously with an understanding of the
>> implications. It's no longer translation, it's, hmm, "translation plus,"
>> or something. I would have no qualms about cleaning up the occasional
>> typographic error, but before rewriting an original with the aim of
>> improving it I would secure my client's fully informed consent. I don't
>> want him coming back later saying, "you misled me about what was in the
>> original, I didn't realize what a crock it was...."
>> 
>> As for condescension, I don't agree that rendering the original
>> faithfully expresses condescension; to the contrary, I think it
>> expresses respect. But taking it upon myself to "improve" it might well
>> be condescending.
> 
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