translation thread

[Emily Saunders]

Greetings!

So I know that this is not crucial to the topic of translation, but as a lifetime lover of Carroll (and a reciter of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" at family gatherings), I was bugged most by the factual error in this discussion:  The *Walrus* of "Through the Looking Glass" fame did not hold a school for oysters.  His relationship to the oysters in "Through the Looking Glass" was to trick them into being eaten (after talking about the oft quoted "shoes and ships and sealing wax...").  It was the Mock Turtle in "Alice in Wonderland" who studied "reeling and writing" in his long ago youth under the tutelage of an old Turtle school master.  

And with regards to translation:  Mr. Gallagher hits it on the nose that the main point in translating this passage is to come up with possible subjects of study that *sound* similar to what you might study in a human school, but are different in ways humorous and appropriate, more or less, for sea creatures.  For those who have not recently read the entire passage, the Mock Turtle describes a curriculum that included:  "...the different branches of Arithmetic — Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision...Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography...Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils."  The wordplay is obvious and to omit that aspect in a translation would be to pretty much omit the entire point of the passage.  Coming up with behaviors appropriate to sea creatures is secondary (as in "uglification" and "derision").  

Regards,

Emily Saunders

On Sep 15, 2013, at 12:20 AM, Paul B. Gallagher wrote:

> Jules Levin wrote:
> 
>> A feat of the translator's art that no computer could match:
>> 
>> Nabokov's rendering of Lewis Carrol's "reeling and writhing" as the
>> curriculum in the Walrus's school for oysters:
>> chesat' i pitat'
>> This is an improvement--"grooming and feeding" is more sea-critterish
>> than reeling and writhing...
> 
> Perhaps.
> 
> But it does have the added bonus that "reeling and writhing" sounds almost like "reading and writing," and "чесать и питать" sounds almost like "читать и писать." In each case, those echoed subjects are plausible elements of a school curriculum.
> 
> -- 
> War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
> --
> Paul B. Gallagher
> pbg translations, inc.
> "Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
> http://pbg-translations.com
> 
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