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

[George Kalbouss]

Years ago, I remember a production of "Faust" at the (then) Kirov Opera.  The entire
cast sang in Russia, but the diva singing the Margarita part sang in her native Latvian.
It all worked very smoothly, except for the scene where Faust eavesdrops on a soliloquy by
Margarita.  Faust then confesses to Mephistopheles that he heard everything, and
the only thought I had was, "so you know Latvian?"  Somehow I couldn't get that idea
out of my mind.

George Kalbouss
The Ohio State University


On Sep 14, 2013, at 11:30 AM, Anna Frajlich-Zajac wrote:

> The production you described sounds like real magic: perfect co-r-respondence of languages and cultures.
> 
> Anna 
> 
> On Sep 14, 2013, at 11:19 AM, Emily Saunders <emilka at mac.com> wrote:
> 
>> I'd sort of like to chime in on the occasional unexpected beauty of translations.  Once, goodness, several decades back when I was living in Vladivostok, a theater troupe came to town from somewhere in eastern California.  They had a production of Hamlet going in their hometown and had been invited by the theater in Vladi-k who were also staging Hamlet.  They put together a collaborative performance that ran for about a week.  Everyone and I mean practically everyone from both filfaks of the University where I was studying/working showed up, and it was an amazing thing.  The American Hamlet's lines were spoken in the original Shakespearean, and he was answered by a Russian Ophelia who gave voice to Pasternak's translation.  The flow was seamless and the interplay of language, centuries between the original and the translation, and the actors was amazing to watch and listen to.  Truly unique and I've never seen anything like it since.  
>> 
>> So translator's out there, yours is a noble work.  Keep debating the merits and bringing the magic!
>> 
>> Emily Saunders
>> 
>> P.S.  I also tend to like the Russian translations of Winnie-the-Pooh a tad better than the original.  Is that heresy?
>> 
>> On Sep 13, 2013, at 11:25 PM, Robert Chandler wrote:
>> 
>>> 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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