Something I thought was particularly interesting was Seidensticker’s mention of how he thinks that a translation that improves on its source work is not a good translation – or at the very least, not as good as one that manages to convey even the flaws of the original. Certainly, the example problem he brings up of ambiguity is a big one, with Japanese being an (in)famously context-sensitive language, but it also makes me wonder what else would be considered a writing flaw, and how you would convey that in the target language. If you even could, of course – he did mention that editors would be likely to stonewall anything they thought of as bad prose, even if it were intentional. I think it’s also interesting how a translation that a monolingual speaker would consider the worse one could be more faithful, and so may very well be one that is (according to this view) superior.
I think it’s also interesting how he clearly feels that a key point when translating is preserving the rhythm of the original work. I think he is drawing particular attention to a more localised sense of rhythm, in terms of how individual passages flow, but it does make me think of how the Hirano reading from this week (and to some extent, the Murakami readings from last week) discusses adding passages to the translation. The short descriptions mentioned are, of course, brief, but I do wonder how they affect the rhythm of the translation, which I suppose only serves to highlight Seidensticker’s point that translators are always making choices, none of which may seem fully adequate.
No comments:
Post a Comment