First, I have now finished reading The Vegetarian! Human Acts, I thought, was a far tauter, darker, and more heartbreaking book, though perhaps given its strangeness, The Vegetarian needs time to marinate. The two books did read as stylistically different to me, so I wonder how much of that was Deborah Smith refining her translating ability and sticking closer to Han Kang’s style, versus how much of it was Kang writing differently in the two books, as befitting their different genres. The Vegetarian feels like an unreal retelling of possible real events, while Human Acts, based on real historical tragedy, is plain, simple, not dramatized, at least as far as I can tell.
Now, moving on to Proust!
Davis:
Her practice of ‘blind translation’ for her first draft is the opposite of what we are doing in the classroom, where we intentionally look at other translations and think about the cultural/personal/historical context of the work/writer. Her approach seems so thoughtful for an experienced translator and I liked how she frames translation as “the pleasure and absorbed concentration of doing a hard word puzzle”.
Again the problem of onomatopoeia that both Jeffrey Angles and Peter Schwartz talked about comes up here, with “zut”.
I also liked her question of intent: “Did I intend to do a close translation or a free translation?” Are those identifiable terms within the field of translating? Is there a sense of when it’s acceptable to do a free translation versus a closed? Perhaps when the original text is old and there’s already many close translations out there? But then, Moncrieff’s translation of Proust was written while they were contemporaries and he seems to have taken some amount of liberty stylistically. Would we be more accepting of Deborah Smith’s translation of The Vegetarian if she articulated it as a ‘free translation’?
I really enjoy the idea of long sentences having “delayed gratification”.
Nelson:
He seems to be on the old school team, as Emma Ramadan had said, of wanting translators to be invisible––to create the ‘illusion’ that the reader is not reading a translation at all. I find that to be almost deceptive, as a reader? And almost an impossible task. It seems to me so much more productive to acknowledge the impossibility of that task and be a participant-observer in the text rather than an invisible man.
I did like his note on Proust’s humour!
Hazzard:
I hated crepuscular! “Twofold twilight” is so much better.
Perhaps Davis’ approach to a first draft is a way to avoid “translation fatigue” or “version fatigue”.
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