This is surprisingly common, especially in poetry. They'll get a grad student to give them a literal, word-by-word translation, and they'll make it pretty and publish it as their own. The grad student is lost to history. WB Yeats's Sophocles renderings are another example.
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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How is that even real? A literal translation of poetry wouldn't convey half the nuance, that's how poetry works.
Right, they get someone else to provide the meaning, and they take care of the nuance. I think Pevear & Volokhonsky have a similar approach to prose. Gregory Rabassa, who most famously translated Gabriel Garcia Marquez, said that his approach to translation was "How would the author write this if they were writing it in English?", and you can see that governing philosophy in poetry all the time. Translations of Homer going from the Greek's dactylic hexameter to English's iambic pentameter, and that kind of thing. Or Ovid's The Art of Love, rendered in limericks.
That's what I mean though, if I'm reading Homer or Rumi or whoever else, I want to read their poetry, not some British academic's. I'm sure their translations are nice, but it might as well be a new work.
then poetry shouldn't be translated?
It should be translated by someone who speaks the language!
I will say that there's no such thing as a perfect translation, and if you really like works in a particular language, you should make an effort to learn it. There's no true substitute, although a good translator can get pretty close.
that's what wertheimer was explaining, a process where specialists from the language it's being translated into refine and format beyond what rote translation accomplishes. if the only acceptable person to participate is a bilingual poet we're not going to get many poetry translations. anonymous grad students that do the translation and such ought to be credited though
IMO The problem with good translation is that in order to do it right the person doing it has to have mastery of both the source and target language plus good understanding of the subject matter and knowledge of the terminology specific to the subject matter. Usually people with this much skill have better things to do so we're stuck with dudes like in this post just absolutely butchering everything.
i feel like that's the sort of person who could tell if a guy like barks is doing a bad job, we're just as amatuer. there's plenty people who might have the academic & language skills without the artistic chops for poetry or prose, and i don't see what's wrong with them collaborating with a creative type, to justify 'unqualified' people's participation & consulting in a translation process.
by all means this dude might be grifter and distorter or scummy about crediting who helped him but simply needling on qualifications instead of specific translations he made that are wrong and comparing those to correct ones is a weird way to approach the issue
if the only acceptable person to participate is a bilingual poet we're not going to get many poetry translations
A small group that's actually collaborating would be fine too, but it doesn't sound like that's what's happening.
I will admit to being a stickler for this kind of thing, though.
it doesn't sound like that's what's happening
he worked with John Moyne (a translator) & some Sufi that lived in Philly, apparently. like some people with related expertise have measured criticism you can find, mostly about "secularizing" the original work, but the pidgeonholing based just on the language/educational pedigree is the very-online devolution of an academic debate
No need to be rude. The person at the top of the thread said it was usually an uncredited grad student doing the translation, and as someone who has done uncredited grad work in the past, I know firsthand how shitty that is and how mediocre the output tends to be. If that isn't what Barks is doing, good on him.
I think poetry in particular is heavily dependent on the specifics of the language being used, so it really is untranslatable more or less. Like puns but even more extreme. Whatever this guy is doing is just stupid and not even an attempt at doing it right tho lol.
Wait, what's up with Pevear & Volokhonsky? My understanding was that they are both bilingual, he a native English speaker, and she a native Russian speaker, and that they work together in an iterative process.
I really liked their translation of Anna Karenina, or at least I read it and came away thinking it's a great book, and so I have several more of their translations on my shelf which I haven't yet tackled.... 
First, Volokhonsky, a native speaker of Russian, produces a complete first draft. Then Pevear, whose spoken Russian is not fluent, revises the draft, working to reproduce the writer’s style coherently in English—“what the French call the language of arrival,” he says. This process is repeated as necessary, draft by draft. “Translation is a craft that sometimes becomes an inspired craft,” Volokhonsky explains.
From here. I think I've read interviews, maybe from earlier in their career, in which he downplays his Russian abilities a bit more than merely "not fluent."
U have no idea how deep of an internet hole I went down after your first comment, and so I have concluded that I want to check out these translations:
- War and Peace tr. by Ann Dunnigan
- Dead Souls by Gogol, tr. by Guerney and Fusso
- Notes from Underground tr. by Garnett, edited by Matlaw
I simultaneously thank u & blame u for putting me to rethinking the Russian lit section of my bookshelf lol
I should read the Guerney and Fusso Dead Souls, too - I read the P&V and based on that and their Master and Margarita translation I think humor is their weak point. Speaking of which, if you come across a good translation of Andrei Bely's Petersburg, please let me know - the one I have (the John Cournos version) sometimes betrays that a joke has been translated, but never in a way that lets you know what was funny.
Janet Malcolm demolishes (somewhat unfairly) P&V: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina/ (Pevear responds)
Several years ago I developed a translation theory obsession, so a few recommendations from that binge -
- David Bellos's Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (the most casually readable one on this list)
- George Steiner's After Babel (controversial but worthwhile)
- Ezra Pound's The ABC of Reading (I know, I know, Ezra Pound, but he and John Dryden are the godfathers of translation theory for poetry and this predates his fascism)
- Barton Raffel's The Art of Translating Poetry
- Eliot Weinberger's Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei
mayos like this really be translating all the text from every single non-european culture and gatekeeping every single english-language Wikipedia article and then you wonder why there are unsourced quotes about Genghis Khan being white lmao
westerners are only able to view the world through a western lens, and is probably one of the reasons why all the "bad country watchers" are always so incredibly wrong
What are you talking about? China's 700th collapse is imminent! They only got like a week left! It's any day now!
there's no way the inferior russian military could match up to superior western wonder weapons, ukraine will win any day now
Plato's Cave was actually about white people refusing to ever read anything in it's original language.
I still think it didn't have a meaning; it was just Plato telling his buddy about his idea for a dystopian novel about people living in a cave looking at shadows (not everyone was cut out to tell stories)
so this mf just reads a rumi poem in english and goes "ah so true" and just changes the words around a bit to make it his own? academia is a grift.
Well to be halfway fair, translating poetry is a fucking art in itself. You have to understand how to convey pace which works differently in different languages.
Like Spanish has long sentences, German has long words, etc. If you directly translate English to Spanish then it’s going to sound really punchy and abrupt and if you directly translate German into English it’s going to become very verbose.
But the issue here is the guy cant read the originals. So how the fuck can he know what the original pace and feeling is supposed to be? He’s writing fan fiction.
But to the broader concept of translating prose, actually that’s an amazing field in itself. The best translators of poetry are multilingual poets because they have to rewrite the poems to get the same feeling as the original, and sometimes the best translations are actually quite distant from a direct transcription of the original.
No he isn't. Fan fiction writers tend to be consumers of the original work
I don't think garden gnomes should hold professorships
🧵 on the secularization of Rumi including examples https://nitter.net/PersianPoetics/status/1261745279860080641#m
Reminds me of how Westerners try to turn the Daodejing into this weird proto-anarchist work when it's actually fairly autocratic at places. The Ursula translation was pretty bad, especially the part where she took out a passage because it was too "Confucian."
Maybe she was worried there would be too much....Confucian
This is like inverse me
Really thought this was going to be about Daniel Ladinsky, who wrote multiple books that pose as translations of the poetry of Hafiz, but actually if you read the forward it is merely poetry "inspired" by Hafiz, he claims Hafiz appeared to him in a dream with these poems. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/6/14/fake-hafez-how-a-supreme-persian-poet-of-love-was-erased
Which was really deflating for me because those Hafiz "poems" helped get me through some angsty times in my young adulthood.
the sad part is this guy eventually got an honorary doctorate in persian literature from university of tehran. the humanities in iran are neglected and in a sad state of affairs this just goes to show how fucked up it is
Went to a posh school