Re: The flurry

robbie, i just read the below email. it says it all
so well. thanks!

kim
--- "L. Manning Vines" <lmanningvines@hotmail.com>
wrote:
> Jim writes:
> << Translating poetry has to be one of the most
> difficult things to do. >>
>
> Yes and no. It's easy to throw together an
> approximation. But to take
> something beautiful and move it seamlessly into
> another language is often
> not only difficult, but utterly impossible. One
> then needs to sacrifice its
> beauty or else to make a new beauty, surely founded
> in the original but
> itself new. Lies and cover-ups. And with some
> poems, of course, to do
> either seems a heresy, so the translator must shake
> his head and throw up
> his hands and just wish that everybody could see it
> as it is. (And we have
> people like the late David Grene, whose many
> translations of classical Greek
> literature were widely acclaimed, but who, despite
> years of prodding from
> those around him, went to his grave refusing to
> translate Homer. And if you
> can't read Homer -- and I mean really read Homer --
> let this anecdote
> explain what you're missing and what you are never
> likely to see.)
>
> Of course, the intended audience for the translation
> rarely knows the
> difference. That's the painful irony -- the
> translator with the task in
> front of him can torture himself even while he knows
> that his audience
> doesn't see or know the original. Jorge Luis Borges
> explains very well (in
> The Homeric Versions) that each new translation of a
> great poem from a
> language he doesn't know is a delight to him --
> wholly familiar yet wholly
> new. But the translator DOES know, and even if he's
> the only one in the
> world, it is sometimes a crippling knowledge. Of
> course, some translators
> DON'T seem to know -- but they're the ones we
> probably shouldn't bother to
> read.
>
> What most of us think of as translation -- what
> translation itself should be
> (but what, alas, it is not) -- is not difficult, it
> is impossible. There
> are English versions of Homer that miss much of his
> beauty and there are
> English versions of Homer that supply their own at
> the expense of accuracy.
> But a Real translation of Homer? Homer himself in
> English? Absurd.
>
> Jim goes on to write:
> << I think "stretches" in relationship to a cat does
> make sense. When my
> wife's cat isn't sleeping or eating, it usually
> stretches out on the floor
> while anticipating its next move. >>
>
> It does make sense -- I didn't like it as much when
> applied to a night, but
> Scottie says that this was, in fact, what he was
> trying for. Maybe I didn't
> like "stretches out" becasut it's uglier than
> "s'épand". (Of course, it
> also results in too many syllables if this matters
> to anyone.) I was trying
> to think of a word that had this very sense Scottie
> and Valérie have spoken
> of, but which seemed to me more appropriate for cats
> AND nights -- and if it
> were a one syllable word, all the better.
>
> I thought of a cat doing this thing cats do -- lying
> on the ground,
> stretching out and coming to relaxation again, then
> seemingly having all of
> its bones crumble into a flesh-sack of purring,
> gelatinous, (and spread-out)
> spoodge. What verb for this? "Melt," I thought.
> And it didn't seem
> inappropriate for a night, either, especially when
> followed by "Silver on
> the grass" and the image of a full moon -- and when
> thinking of a cat doing
> this thing (I admit, thinking of ice quite spoils
> it), it seems to carry the
> weight of "to stretch" or "to spread," or even of
> what I think is a rarer
> and mostly literary use of "épandre," "to pour
> forth" or "to give
> abundantly."
>
> Perhaps the translation required a footnote warning
> not to think of ice, but
> of melting cats.
>
> -robbie
> -
> * Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with
> the message
> * UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
Received on Mon Jun 23 13:38:50 2003