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On translation
January 22,
2003
I find in Vance's
names, personal and geographical, many influences of various
languages -- Celtic, Slavic, Germanic, Romanesque, even
Hungarian and Finnish. I suppose, like any inventive author,
he uses multilingual dictionaries to find colorful
"associative" roots, and then modifies these morphemes
according to his taste and context. "Tschai" ("chay") is
"tea" in Russian, for example. Hardly a coincidence.
Good translation can be as good as the original. However, it
is never the same book -- there is never an exact
equivalence between languages. Some nuances and effects are
inevitably lost; something different is added or emphasized
to compensate for the loss. Sometimes (rarely) translations
make even better impression than the originals. I strongly
suspect that English and French translations of Dostoyevsky
are better written than their Russian counterparts:
Dostoyevsky is not a great wordsmith in Russian, he can be
extremely awkward, sloppy, heavy, even stupid. Famous
examples from Dostoyevsky: "He crossed himself with his
right hand", it says in Dostoyevsky's Russian; "He crossed
himself", it says in English translation. The latter is
correct, of course. "He left, leaving the dead body where he
left it", says Dostoyevsky (as if it isn't clear that the
"body" is dead, and as if "he" would habitually carry the
bodies of his victims with him); "He left without giving the
still body another look", writes the English translator --
and this is much better!
I have never seen a good English rhymed translation of good
Russian poetry, for example of Pushkin (even Nabokov's
translation of "Onegin" is nothing compared to the
original). Perhaps, poetry cannot be translated well at all.
Dante in Italian impressed me ten times more than Dante in
Russian (while Lozinsky's Russian translation of Dante's "La
Divina Commedia" is considered to be exemplary by the
critics). Alexander Pushkin translated (probably, just to
exercise his pen) several triplets from Dante into Russian,
and he _was_ able to convey the terrible succulent tension
and macabre beauty of these few lines. But Pushkin himself
(who was fluent in French, Italian, and English) asserted
that rhymed translation of the true poetry is
impossible.
Even prosaic good translations are rare. For example, I've
seen three different English translations of Bulgakov's
famous "Master and Margarita". Two were terrible,
particularly the latest American one; one (published in the
UK in the 60s) is excellent. The translator had a
Polish-sounding name, and I have never seen his name
anywhere else, but his translation of Bulgakov is a true
masterpiece. It is sufficiently true to the original but
isn't rigid or pedantic, that is, translator paid more
attention to creating the correct identical _effect_ than to
following the original verbatim. Choice of the words (size
of the lexicon), general level of freedom of expression and,
most importantly, innate talent are crucial in a translator.
Unfortunately, to be able to judge a translation, one has to
be familiar with the original. This is why bad translations
proliferate and predominate. -
Alexander Feht
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