> >
> >>Which leads me to wonder to what extent the ease or difficulty of a work
in
> >>terms of translation may do for its reputation. It's a long time since I
> >>received the idea that whereas Dante translates very well, due to the
force
> >>of the visual in the Commedia, such undoubtedly major poets as Pushkin
and
> >>Goethe are under-regarded outside their own linguistic boundaries,
perhaps
> >>because of their reliance on (what Jakobson called, in the case of
Pushkin)
> >>a 'poetry of grammar'. I wonder is this true? At all?
In fact, Pushkin has been lucky in his English translators, at least for
Eugene Onegin. James Falen (World's Classics) and Charles Johnson (Penguin)
both give versions that combine narrative drive, wit, and a sense of tonal
complexity that give at least a sense of the joys within the Russian text.
Probably because both learnt from Byron, who influenced Pushkin so much.
There's a lively discussion of Pushkin translations (and many more general
translation issues) in Le Ton Beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter (Yes, the
Godel Escher Bach man) . Hofstadter's interest in Artificial Intelligence
was always in the problems of representation and coding. In this book he
deals with the difficulty of re-encoding from one language and formal system
into another. Because he comes from a background outside the normal literary
enclaves some of what he says can sound naive to a literary ear - but that
makes it bracing, a really good book to argue with.
Hofstadter wrote his own translation of Eugene Onegin - which for me at
least doesn't work at all.
______________________________________________
George Simmers
Snakeskin Poetry Webzine is at
http://www.snakeskin.org.uk
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