Subject: Re: Sergeant Rilko
AntiUtopia@aol.com
Date: Fri Mar 03 2000 - 11:07:56 EST
As to your first question, I don't know the answer, but I suspect that was the problem Spivak had to confront in his introduction, having devoted probably a couple years to providing this English translation within a paradigm that questions the validity of translations :) I don't remember his argument or I'd sum it up.
That's the thing with poetry, though. I'd almost think we would have one set of statements for translating poetry, and another for translating prose. I agree "booze" is never a word that would come out of Rilke's pen...in a poem, at least. I think we can trust the "content" of translations when the translations are of sentences related to phyiscal description. But to get the nuances of the language...the flow, and the rhyme...most translators abandon that and try to just communicate the meaning.
Jim
> Where does this leave us with translations of Derrida? I tried him
> in French, but of course Derridian French is proportionately more
> difficult in French as in English.
>
> During the last Rilke summit on this list, translations took a
> beating. I propose "The Panther" as a test case because it's a kind
> of Kobiashi Maru (sp?) for translation. It's a failure of a poem
> without the metrical scheme, and if translating straight semantics
> is impossible, translating meter and semantics is even more
> impossible. By degrees, by degrees.
>
> No hesitation for me. I join my sometimes adversaries on this
> point. Occasionally (as with the Moncrieff Proust, perhaps), a
> translator himself happens to be brilliant, and so his translation
> achieves its own transcendence in art. Still, this is prose. The
> lilt and bounce of the language in a poem presents a challenge even
> more difficult than the considerable challenge of translating
> prose.
>
> Rilke lovers: choose your translations with care. I illustrate
> with a particularly uncomfortable passage from a translation by
> Walter Arndt:
>
> "It wasn't inside me. I'd find it and lose it.
> I tried to hang on to it then. And booze it."
>
> would your beloved Rilke ever use the word "booze"? Even supposing
> it's an accurate translation of "Der Wein" (it isn't), could Rilke
> let those ugly, drawling sounds out of his pen? Here is the German,
> if you wish to compare further:
>
> "Es war nicht in mir. Es ging aus und ein.
> Da wollt ich es halten. Dahielt es der Wein."
>
> No case can be made for any observance of semantics in Arndt's
> work. I think "it went out and in" works much more nicely (and it's
> metrically sound, if that's your thing) than "I'd find it and lose
> it." But of course, there is no word for "Wein"--no matter how much
> more violence we do to it--that could rhyme in English with "in,"
> so, as I guess at Arndt, the better semantics fall by the wayside.
> Etc.
>
> "...or *learn the language*, if you please,"
>
> --
> Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu
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