I thought the dialect discussion and some of the tangential points brought up in relation to it in the round table reading reading particularly interesting. Intuitively, there certainly would be something different about the impression that characters speaking different dialects leave on people reading it in its original language, and one would certainly want to try to preserve that when translating it; yet, as the translators at the discussion mention, transposing it to a dialect associated with a certain English-speaking region of the world, like Cockney, does somehow feel wrong. I definitely think Seidensticker hits the mark here when he says that "dialect ... doesn't travel," as it feels like having an accent that the English-speaking reader can place somehow breaks the suspension of disbelief in a way that more standard English does not.
I think the point that Seidensticker raises with regards to Genji Monogatari is worth considering too. He remarks that these days Genji is considered haute couture even in Japan, despite it being a colloquial work when originally written. I imagine this is probably due to the evolution of Japanese dating the classical language even to a Japanese speaker. In this sense, it does seem like while we speak of an ideal where we try to translate the experience of a native speaker reading the original, this experience cannot be said to be unified at all.
Copeland, on the other hand, discusses in detail how the different expectations of communities of readers result in heavy changes being made beyond just the translation of the text, and provides more insight into why these major changes happen, which I thought was worth noting as a parallel to Seidensticker talking about how he had greatly reduced the amount of crying in Genji in his translation. Copeland mentions that she was taught by Seidensticker, so I thought this parallel was a neat illustration of her point that individual translators are influenced by many voices.
No comments:
Post a Comment