Yes, you can find a good discussion of translatorese at work on Kafka in
Kundera's *Les testaments trahis*. And prose depends much less on the
phonetic gestalt than poetry. I call - for convenience's sake - such a
translation facing the original a "crib", since one uses it to find
access to what I will call "the original" despite Pierre's
protestations. So one doesn't need all the ghastly rhetorical filler,
the useless inversions and wooden rhymes & at least try to hear the
poet. Of course there are translators with a feeling for sounds, and the
more visually oriented a poem is the less important - relatively
speaking - its phonic structure, so surrealist work comes out fairly
well. And I'm happy with Hass's collaboration with Milosz on the
latter's poems, which was a Glücksfall, I think. (I can hardly "hear"
written Polish at all...)
mjay
Roger Day wrote:
> I admit to these days only to liking translations with the original
> attached.
>
> There was a nice article in the Guardian the other week about
> translators cleaning up the syntax and punctuation in the target
> language, rather than translating the original syntax, punctuation etc
> - part of missing the original complexity.
>
> Roger
>
> On 09/05/06, MJ Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> 1) a) Of course - b) that's exactly why I speak of imitations &
>> per/versions.
>> 2) But what is anything *put* into language a translation of? To me, a
>> poem is a creation, a construct, an artefact. Who's worrying? What I was
>> polemically digging at was the spread of watery "translations" coming to
>> replace, in their pseudo-poetic way, the original complexity. I am
>> thinking especially of all the awful translations of Rilke I have seen.
>> 3) I never said it wasn't.
>> 4) I like Robert Kelly's translation of Shelley.
>>
>> Martin
>>
>> Pierre Joris wrote:
>>
>> > 1) a) of course, poetry is untranslatable. and b) that's exactly why
>> > we have to translate it.
>
>
> --
> http://www.badstep.net/
> http://www.cb1poetry.org.uk/
> "All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla-Prague Away Kit"
> Half-Man Half-Biscuit
>
--
The self that shines in the greying sunshine
of the immediate is actual, though it is
not all that is there. - Douglas Oliver
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