"Translators Struggle to Prove Their Academic Bona Fides"

[Tony Anemone]

The Italian proverb "Tradurre e Tradire" (''traduttore, traditore'') suggests another way of looking at hostility to translation - i.e., even the best translation necessarily involves some violence (oversimplification, change of emphasis, etc.) done to the original work.  Add in a bit of traditional condescension to those readers who need to read works in translation, and I think the attitudes towards translation still common in the academy make sense.  Not that they're right, but these opinions come out of a certain tradition.

Tony Anemone

On Feb 26, 2010, at 10:04 AM, Olga Meerson wrote:

> Re:
> 
>> Ehm, ehm, rarely has Slavic linguistics flourished as much as under the uncultured Chomskian denial of our linguistic differences. Study of these differences may have been one of the reasons... JT
> 
> (A) Never said Chomsky's denial of differences was "uncultured". Merely that he has ignored the differences between linguistic categories and what they express in different cultures. Pretty ironic for someone who, in politics, is so anti-globalist. Each one of us has our own nemesis, so no grudges there--merely compassion. I shun globalism as much as Chomsky does, only believe he has contributed, by the way he thinks of languages' universals, where differences may matter more. It is like substituting political correctness for the tolerance of cultural, and linguistic, plurality and true differences, which, at times--o horror!--are irreconcilable!  From Chomsky's point of view, translation is pretty simple and can be programmed and achieved mechanically, provided the mechanism is sophisticated enough. This point of view, ultimately, would inevitably belittle the work of a translator. Chomsky, though, is not the main culprit here--merely a symptom.
> 
> (B) As to "rarely", I also beg to differ. Anna Wierzbicka's approach, for example, seems to have contributed to Slavic linguistics no less than Chomsky's, to put it mildly. If you want someone closer to Structuralism, I could cite Jakobson. But my argument is moot: I am not a linguist--merely someone interested in the ineffable and untranslatable in different languages, nay, even more concretely, in different languages' DIFFERENT poetic potentials. For all practical purposes, I am a dilettante, an academic NEMO, i.e., not a theoretician--even in literary matters-- but a hermeneutic philologist, i.e., an interpreter, that is, merely a translator. Precisely my point: "merely" a translator.  
> o.m.
> 
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