mal4mac
10-23-2009, 09:09 AM
I'm trying to find translations of 'great works' that give the illusion of listening to the voice of the author as if they had been born in our time and place. I know I'm likely to be criticised for this, as 'foreignizing' and 'classicizing' are 'in'. But, heck, that's what I want. So any suggestions? An example that (mostly) worked for me is Grossman's translation of Don Quixote.
What makes my task difficult is that previously domesticating publishers, like penguin, are moving away from supporting the common reader by producing student versions that are forced to be literal through pressure from academics. This has resulted in them publishing several versions of classics, making it difficult to find the right one for me - the commonest of readers :)
At the opposite pole from what I want is the literalist Nabakov, who sacrificed beauty & readability for overly-literal meaning.
Peter France has a great discussion of the issues involved*. One of his examples is varying translations of Rousseau, starting with the literalist Alan Bloom:
‘Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of the things: everything degenerates in the hands of man.’
And the (over?) domesticating Foxley:
‘God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.’
I'm looking for translators who avoid Bloom's literalness, but who do not distort quite as much as Foxley (who said anything about 'evil'?) For example: about the Oxford World’s Classics' Confessions,France says: "Angela Scholar produced a text that manages to be both close and readable."* That's the ideal for me!
Reference:
* Peter France 'The Rhetoric of Translation' http://www.mhra.org.uk/ojs/index.php/MLR/article/viewFile/3/34
What makes my task difficult is that previously domesticating publishers, like penguin, are moving away from supporting the common reader by producing student versions that are forced to be literal through pressure from academics. This has resulted in them publishing several versions of classics, making it difficult to find the right one for me - the commonest of readers :)
At the opposite pole from what I want is the literalist Nabakov, who sacrificed beauty & readability for overly-literal meaning.
Peter France has a great discussion of the issues involved*. One of his examples is varying translations of Rousseau, starting with the literalist Alan Bloom:
‘Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of the things: everything degenerates in the hands of man.’
And the (over?) domesticating Foxley:
‘God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.’
I'm looking for translators who avoid Bloom's literalness, but who do not distort quite as much as Foxley (who said anything about 'evil'?) For example: about the Oxford World’s Classics' Confessions,France says: "Angela Scholar produced a text that manages to be both close and readable."* That's the ideal for me!
Reference:
* Peter France 'The Rhetoric of Translation' http://www.mhra.org.uk/ojs/index.php/MLR/article/viewFile/3/34