Re: Universitatlity

--- James Rovira <jrovira@drew.edu> wrote:
> Yeah, this is a tough subject. I tend to think people forget that
> Europen and Latin American readers have a great deal of cultural context
> in common with US readers -- you're right that Holden's world was
> narrow, but God, how many movies are shot on the streets of NYC and
> distributed around the world? Or for that matter, how much literature
> is set in the city?

I don't know. I share a classroom with the Sophomore English teacher, and
I watched her struggle with teaching The Catcher in the Rye to a classroom
full of fifteen- and sixteen-year-old New Yorkers. They didn't like it.
What was this language? they complained. Holden's problems are
ridiculous, they say. My kids get free lunch; Holden can borrow enough
"dough" from his little *sister* to survive, so what's he complaining
about? One kid suggested that Holden spend some time dodging bullets in
Brownsville and then he'd get over himself. It's not easy to be bored
with life when you're worried about keeping your body bullet-free, he
said.

Also, I don't think it's the same New York. Holden sits in a Penn Station
that doesn't exist anymore, the carousel plays a song that you have to
search through music archives to hear, and he speaks in a slang so foreign
to modern ears that more than one teenage reader has to grab a dictionary.
 By making his story so up-to-date, Salinger dated it.

All I'm saying is that if these are the issues a New York teenager has
with an *untranslated* text, the translated version, imagined through
information gleaned through a thousand translated New York movies, is
highly problematic. What's the first line from the French version?
Something about David Copperfield salade?

Something else occurs to me: it's been several years since Paul Miller
posted the varied translations of Rilke's "The Panther" and we've got
about a million new people around here lately. Reading and comparing
makes the point far better than I ever could:

http://www.roughdraft.org/JDS/JDS.ocon.mar00/0114.html

(Whatever happened to Paul Miller?)

Best,
Cecilia.

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Received on Sat Dec 6 14:37:54 2003