Re: trainlasting
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Mon, 18 Oct 1999 17:12:00 -0500
William Hochman wrote:
> I wanted to ask the tranlasting thinkers here if they could explain
> Salinger's success with being translated into Japanese and German?
How do we measure his success at being translated into Japanese?
Without recourse to a fluent Japanese/English-speaking person whose
credentials and sanity have been sufficienty demonstrated?
> I like Robert Bly's _8 Stages of Translation_ because he thinks
> translating is art-making and suggests poets do the translating work by
> being poets first and language mavens next.
That's really what the issue boils down to--the inability of an
aesthetically invested person (well, any understanding person,
actually, but especially those with a flair for writing) to transfer a
poem between languages without also translating it through his own
undertanding.
When Bottom is "translated" into an ass, he isn't changed entirely and
simply from man to beast. He has the head of an ass, but only sort
of, and he remains pure rude mechanical from the shoulders down (I
suppose). He is really neither--nor man nor beast would recognize him
(we'll leave the faeries out of it for now).
> In some ways, I want to lay down an imaginary trump card here and suggest
> all literature is translation...the non-language of emotion to language,
> from experience to language, from language to language, we are always
> translating...
I don't know about your unconscious, but mine's structured like a
language...
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu