Translation

Welcome to the list, Marķa. Surely you are being humble about your English.
  Whether through the ease of fluency or through the concerted attention of
slow and careful composition, your post is more clear and grammatical than
those of a great number of native speakers.

I too am fascinated by translation and its difficulties and limits. I am
especially interested in your comment concerning the "remarkable"
differences between translations made in Argentina and Spain. I have a
certain filial interest in Argentina since my father grew up there and much
of my family remains there, but my curiosity is further provoked by the
suggestion of the specific reflections of culture in translation. This is
surely always involved in translation, but I find that it tends to be a
difficult object of observation and I am fascinated by it. A fellow from
the Jewish Publication Society reportedly said, referring to difficulties
(and impossibilities) in translating the Torah, that one often finds he is
not dealing so much with words and phrases as with civilizations.

I wonder if you were referring exclusively to Spanish and Argentine
translations of Salinger, or Spanish and Argentine translations more
generally; and if you see these remarkable differences as purely linguistic
phenomena, reflecting only Spanish dialectical differences, or if they
suggest different translation-cultures in Europe and Latin America.

I hope that you will say more about this.

I admit that I have not often applied these ideas to Salinger in the most
recent years, but I do often wonder -- to use an example in Salinger -- to
what extent one translates Holden Caulfield's sentences, and to what extent
one translates Holden Caulfield. It seems to me that people often ignore
this question altogether, or else that they answer it with one extreme or
the other (and I expect that which extreme they prefer reflects their
prejudices concerning language, culture, meaning, understanding, truth, et
cetera); but it is a profoundly important problem, as it seems to me, and
one that cannot be satisfactorily dismissed with either extreme.

-Robbie

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Received on Wed Dec 3 23:31:16 2003