SEELANGS Digest - 12 Sep 2013 to 13 Sep 2013 (#2013-378)

[Robert Chandler]

Dear Sasha,

> Robert, as far as I understand, you are SEELANGS' favorite translator (including yours truly), why would you feel so attacked by a statement that seems quite reasonable?  Does it wound your translator's sensibility so much to read that no translation is ever perfect?  Gandlevsky once said that a translation is like a black and white photograph of the color original.  Is that so inaccurate?  
Thank you very much, Sasha, for the compliment.  But I do feel that this image of the black and white photo suggests that we are setting the bar too low.  It is not a bad image and it is, of course, accurate as applied to many translations. But there are occasions when translators do better than this, and I certainly hope, at least sometimes, to do better than that myself.

To take 2 examples of translations I was able to include in my anthology of Russian short stories for Penguin Classics - I think that William Edgerton's translation of Leskov's 'Levsha' and the translation of Bunin's 'The Gentleman from San Francisco by Koteliansky, D.H.Lawrence and Leonard Woolf (!) are at least as good, if not better, than the originals.

All the best,

Robert





Robert Chandler, 42 Milson Road, London, W14 OLD

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