>I'd rather not understand something exciting than
>completely understand something banal, and those hack translators have a
>lot to answer for, I'd say. We may live in a quantitive "golden age" but
>there's a lot of base metal about...
How much "understanding" occurs in a boring translation? Not much, I'd
say: perhaps all that's offered is the most prosaic of interpretations,
as if the meaning of the poem only exists in the dictionary definitions
of words. It's about as profound as those movie hacks who say wisely
that film is a "sequence of images".
I remember years ago watching the Attic Theatre Company perform The
Bacchae in the original Greek, which was a formative experience. A
couple of years later they toured a production of Muller's Medeamaterial,
which was equally astonishing in completely different ways. Not
understanding the language was no barrier to "understanding": among other
things what stood out what the vigor and muscle and rhythm of the
language. But these were very poetic productions.
Cheers
AC
PO Box 186
Newport VIC 3105
AUSTRALIA
home page: http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338
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