-------Original Message-------
From: Anny Ballardini <[log in to unmask]>
>>Now about hypocrisy -
I am very interested in your discussions on translations, since I am a
translator - this is my qualification, and I sort of grew up with two
languages, and studied a couple more, and got into them, and tried to
understand the why's and because's, and there are many.
This said, I was trying to understand how -impassioned and erotic- could
fit the spoken Italian language:
with -impassioned- I agree, genders all day long and no one even notices
them, and by following this thought of mine, I also added: hypocritical,
that is the wish of not seeing things as they are expressed. Which
connotes also my evaluation of the Italian society at large, we are all open books
every time we write or speak, anyhow I think this is what I thought.
I hope this answers your question,
Yes, thanks for your well-said post, and I know you are interested
in these things as a translator, which it seems to me is an
odd state of being since one always looks from the language
one is within as if from outside of it. I grew up speaking
only English, but in another sense, I grew up speaking and
hearing the very different languages of my mother and father,
one very emotive, and other very distanced and full of the
thingness of ideas, and literally translating what each of
them was saying to the other. So in a way, from that experience,
I always feel that translating is a translating of being, as much
as of language. So I found your well said post not only answered
my question but brought in other more interesting things. And,
yes, it could be called a kind of hypocrisy to speak a gendered
language and impassionedly and never notice what one is saying,
though I would probably call it something else, :), like being
asleep. But you are right, I think, that language is often
expressed along with that "wish of not seeing things
as they are expressed," in which the speaker is unaware
of all that that resides in the language itself, in particular
individual ways, but also just in the general terms of how
each language has so much embedded within it. Though I think
non native speakers of the Romance languages often do feel
in hearing it that sense of its being erotic or impassioned.
On the other hand, with English, that quality of thingness
which is separate from human qualities also has its own
hypocrisy, perhaps, in that it seems very easy in English
to make the human a thing, to regard feelings and people
and ideas as objects that can be examined and manipulated
much as a hammer or a table might be. So there is always
something unclaimed in speaking any language. And perhaps
one of the values of translating is that, to the degree
the translator is capable, some of what is unclaimed can
be brought into the light, into a new seeing that illuminates
both the translation and the perception of the original.
Take care,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
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