Mark Weiss said (speaking of J. Rothenberg's Navaho translations),
>But they are accurate--they replicate the originals with
>great exactitude. Which is another problem for me: my sense is that they
>fail to incorporate the context or translate the significance within the
>culture of origin into terms understandable by members of the target
>culture. Translation between cultures as well as languages is what
>translators are supposed to do, in my humble.
I agree, and this is a tough issue that has as much to do with the "small
words" as it does with nouns. But to illustrate Mark's point with a concrete
--tho relatively simple-- example from the Jaime Saenz project (the passage
I'm quoting is the ending of a prose poem titled "The Candle and the
Breeze", written in the early 1950's):
........
That's what "E" means. "E", so dead and quiet and architectonic as you,
experimenting with whether or not to use it, saying, "I'm here", "one",
"were", "fear", "hope", "petticoat", "Caquiaviri", "then", "Erasmus"; or
better yet, "student", "we're on our way to my father's house", "I am here
to invite you all to crumpets", "illusion", "don't tickle gentlemen on the
bus", "it seems like they insist on not putting the leashes where they
belong", "grooves", "the faggots have not yet been taken from the oven", "a
couple brothers want to sell their coffee shop, but for cash", "the clothes
are wet", "you always want to have it your way", "sewer drain".
That's how "E" is.
Deafening and curious, like rain; you can't suit "E" or "T" to any other
letter of the alphabetum, to the candle or the breeze.
The candle and the breeze are beings apart. Unknowable. Your sadness spokes
outward from this unknowing. It is the interregnum between your soul and the
candle and the breeze.
Now go to sleep with the dark things you are always seeking and never
finding.
-----------
My example of "cultural translation" pertains to the word "faggots", which
is our translation of "rosquetes", the word for "doughnut" in Spanish.
"Rosquete" is also a common equivalent in Bolivia for "queer". The
disturbing, doubled sense of the sentence would not be lost on a Bolivian
reader, so "doughnut", the most "literal" choice, obviously doesn't do. But
"queer" would also have been off, since the sly indirectness of the
declaration is part of the intent and semantic charge. "Faggots", is far
from satisfactory, but seems to preserve to some extent the effect of the
original.
Of course, to the extent that this example constitutes a tiny triumph, it
comes in the midst of twenty crushing defeats, and no doubt twenty three
others of which we aren't even aware.
Kent
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