Kent Johnson (that's me) said in previous post, gobbling away like an
abstract turkey:
"Fidelity in translation, it seems to me, involves an attentiveness to
effects of estrangement within the original that are not even translatable
to the linear spectrum of slavish literalness through creative excrescence
that Peter mentions below. The translator must also read for traces of
red-shift, so to speak, and then convert those into formulations of
difference that mark a distance that is irrecoverable. Sometimes, by chance,
there is unexpected beauty there."
***
If I could try to make a bit more sense by being more specific: Saenz, for
example, often drapes his language over Andean-indigenous
grammatical/syntactical structures, giving the original Spanish a density
that even Bolivian readers have found hermetic and distancing. (Pronominal
shiftings or verbal scramblings, for instance, the latter involving
ungrammatical uses, say, of the imperfect or subjunctive, forms which most
often don't have isolable lexical transference to English.) The problem for
the translator at moments like these is not so much how to "bring the
Spanish across," as how to bring across a charged, alienating effect enacted
in the original. To be "faithful", then, there are times when certain
"creative excrescences", even neologistic interventions become valid
options. This is what I meant when I suggested a qualification to the linear
"spectrum of accuracy" that Peter seemed to be evoking in his original post.
It's not a novel point, I know, but an important one in the translation of
linguistically and conceptually challenging work: to maintain her or his
"faithfulness", the translator must sometimes get into rooms beyond the
ground floor of semantic or even architectonic concerns. And it may be that
in doing so the notion of being "discreetly helpful" to the reader will not
and should not be foremost in the translator's mind. The translator is not
always the butler; sometimes s/he's the ghost who says, "This is a
translation. Boo!"
Some of what I'm trying to say here must relate to Pierre Joris's experience
(an heroic case!) in translating Celan, though I'm sure he could discuss
these issues much more elegantly than I. (by the way Pierre, curious what
you think of Heather McHugh's new translations of Celan, which are getting
lots of attention?)
Kent
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