I thought that the readings for this week were very insightful, and provided a much-needed look into the thoughts of professional translators as they go through the process. One of the main things I thought was particularly fascinating was the mention of substantial changes in a translation that were approved or even requested by the author – such as how Kenzaburo Oe asked Philip Gabriel to delete certain passages and even insert new text, or how according to Emmerich, Murakami approved Rubin’s decision to cut over 25,000 words from his translation of 1Q84 (although it is unclear whether these were all minor changes made over the course of an extremely long book, or entire passages cut out completely as with Kenzaburo’s Somersault).
While I think it is fairly clear that the experience of reading a translation will never be precisely the same as reading the work in its original language, I think that these examples truly drive home the point of just how different these two things can be. At the same time, though, it makes me think that one experience is not necessarily inferior to the other, since if the author themselves is the one making the change to their work, who is to say which is the “definitive” version? In fact, doing both might be truly valuable in a way just one or the other is not. I think Lesser touches on this too in her article, where she discusses how reading Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation of Dostoyevsky allowed her to appreciate his works more. When we read a translation, we are also reading the translator’s interpretation of the text in question, and I think a good translation may be able to communicate this interpretation in ways that we may not have considered otherwise.
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