i love translations i love the act of translation i love it so so much
translation is so fun because people feel so strongly about it and for good reason because ultimately it’s all about sacrifice. do you sacrifice form for content? content for mood? mood for form? there are no solutions just compromises. as anthony burgess said, “translation is not a matter of words only; it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture”. nabokov referred to a bad translation as giving “the impression that I am witnessing a murder and can do nothing to prevent it”. the husband and wife translators of russian novels, pevear and volokhonsky work in tandem, translating and reading and polishing in a process pevear referred to as “raising questions”. douglas hofstadter asked multiple people he knew to translate a short 16th century french poem and came back with wildly varying results. to use eliot weinberger’s words, “every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation” and the actual literal act of translating from one language to another exposes so much about the languages and the author and the translator and the reader of the translation! it’s a deeply intricate analysis that expands continuously outward!
You think you have problems? Imagine that you have to live with a chicken-sized, blood-sucking parasite attached to your head. This poor Miniopterus bat that we caught during the biodiversity survey of Gorongosa National Park has to endure living with a wingless fly Penicillidia, which never leaves its body and loves to hang out on the top of its head.
