Re: translations
Malcolm Lawrence (malcolm@wolfenet.com)
Tue, 27 Jan 1998 01:13:59 -0800
Scottie Bowman wrote:
> French is the one language other than my own that I can
> read with moderate ease. And I've had much pleasure not
> only from translations of great stylists like Flaubert or Camus
> but also, in schooldays, the straight stuff from Daudet,
> Maupassant & so on. But, in honesty, I haven't the faintest
> idea how these writers really `feel' to a native speaker.
>
> Indeed, despite my affection for him, I'm sure I miss many of his
> nuances too. So much depends on a shared culture as well as
> a shared language. When I see how subtly `wrong' Americans or
> English, for example, get the Dublin of James Joyce or Brendan
> Behan, I despair of us ever really understanding each other.
When I first became obsessed with James Joyce and learned that he had used a
work of Maupassant's as a crucial model for Ulysses I was devastated to find
that it hadn't been translated into English. Still, Joyce taught himself
Norwegian so he could read Ibsen's original texts, so what was my excuse?