While I personally learned a lot from David's talk, I was slightly worried if like he had said, the details might have been a bit too niche at times. Regardless, I did very much enjoy his candid anecdotes regarding his encounters with editors in both spheres of literature. Looking back on it now, the talk he gave really does echo a lot of themes found in his research that I had come across when I was gathering material for my presentation; mostly centering around Japanese literature translation as a whole, and how it has changed over the years. Of course the time I spent with both David and Allison prior to the talk itself was very enlightening, and overall I felt as if I had learned a great deal about publishing translations within the Japanese to English context. I would have however, enjoyed hearing about some examples of the process and how they lead to changes such as the change in translation from The Briefcase to Strange Weather in Tokyo.
Reading through the translations of Julia Nemirovskaya, it is hard not to notice that the translations have a rhyme scheme to them, and thinking back to what we read of Onegin translations, this really does make me question what was sacrificed in order to create the pattern. But clearly, especially in the Asymptote article, Boris Dralyuk seems to be not as concerned with what is explicitly written down on the page; rather than the methodical dissection and judgement hereafter that causes Nabokov to judge that his poems are impossible to render unto English, Boris seems to instead be more in-tune with the emotional response induced by the poem, almost as if for him the act of translating the poems is akin to reading them. I also do very enjoy the metaphor of translation as smuggling,
Steven
No comments:
Post a Comment