Subject: Re: Sergeant Rilko
From: Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 03 2000 - 10:28:25 EST
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 - * Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message * UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
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