"Translators Struggle to Prove Their Academic Bona Fides"

[Valentino, Russell]

VB,

One difficulty here, it seems to me, comes from the attempt to generalize about what any translation can or can't accomplish. Translations are as audience specific as any other utterances, which means the aims and success of translating, e.g., a Neruda poem for third-graders in a rural school in Texas or a Catullus poem for the readership of the New Yorker, are bound to be quite different. Likewise the question of what can be (or even ought to be) "conveyed" to different audiences. There are an infinite number of variables here.

Discussions about the possibility or, more frequently, impossibility of translation put the emphasis primarily on conveyance rather than creation. If you are thinking about the impact/influence of Akhmatova or Chekhov in English, or Shakespeare or Whitman in Russian, or Dante or Homer in either, then questions of the translators' creative skills become central (I am thinking of the many great poet-translators in both language traditions, but prose artists could easily be included). Some works come to live and prosper in their new home. When they do, it is often more a tribute to the creative skills of their translators than the ability of their translators' to convey.

Gregory Rabassa claims in his memoir that he sometimes would not read to the end of the book he was translating in order to preserve a sense of possibility and wonder, which he believed then made its way into his translation. Does that count as a tool?

Russell Valentino

-----Original Message-----
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [mailto:SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of Vadim Besprozvanny
Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 1:40 PM
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] "Translators Struggle to Prove Their Academic Bona Fides"

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

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