Yes, that's precisely the way I'm using the dual-sided version of Lais
De Marie De France, one in modern French, and the other medeival.
Irritatingly, as I feel it's a cop-out although I can understand why,
the modern french is in prose.
Thanks for the reference to *Les testaments trahis*. I'll look it up.
Roger
On 09/05/06, MJ Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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...)
--
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