"Translators Struggle to Prove Their Academic Bona Fides"

[Vadim Besprozvanny]

Dear Olga,

You just approached an interesting point that always puzzles me. According
to Iakobson / any linguistic poetics, an artistic text is a multilayered
structure that incorporates properties of a natural language (phonetics,
morphology, syntax, etc.) and "extra-linguistic" mechanisms (rhetoric,
prosody, etc.) And the semantic structure of the text exists is a product
of the correlation of these layers/mechanisms (sorry for starting with such
obvious things). Does this mean that any translation of prose/poetry is
able only to aim at conveying a "story" rather than reconstructing this
complex "organism"? Or are there any other tools of a more artistic/less
linguistic nature that help? If you could recommend me any examples of
using any specific approaches I'll really appreciate it!

VB   


On Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:04:18 -0500, Olga Meerson <meersono at GEORGETOWN.EDU>
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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