I found Siedensticker's commitment to the original text as much as possible to be interesting, especially in his comparison of translators to counterfeiters. Although I really relate to his point about how often translating is about choosing between two unsatisfactory choices because something must be lost, I also found his adamancy about not upstaging the author to be interesting. This does make sense because the job of the translator is to remain faithful to the text and convey the message to a different audience. However, as discussed in Hirano's piece regarding how some things must be added, removed, or changed in order for the message to make any sense for the new audience, I found Siedensticker's commitment to accuracy to be interesting. Although it's hard to say who is right and it may be different depending on the situation, I think this goes back to the idea of choosing between two unsatisfactory possibilities as every translation is a tradeoff, requiring some sort of sacrifice of an element.
Both readings touch upon the idea that in many cases, one Japanese word can have many nuanced meanings which a direct translation of the word into English cannot capture. I feel it likely the same translating from English to Japanese as well but the levels of formality in Japanese likely complicate the task further. I also found it particularly interesting how honest Siedensticker was about the authors he translates as well as the editors. He is very blunt in describing Kawabata's writing style and that surprised me as I did not expect him to call out his bad writing at times. I figured most translators would be kinder to the authors they are working with, especially as he himself had just stated that his job was to remain faithful to the original author.
No comments:
Post a Comment