Please bear with me for some semi-coherent thoughts as we rapidly approach our blogging deadline. I wanted to start with how much I loved the beginning and the ending of 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. The middle— well, reading that much criticism makes me nauseous. The book ended in such a funny place with the meeting with the Furious Professor (please give me a whole book about the Furious Professor) and the reflection that he is/was "the purest form of literary critic: a man who devotes his life to demolishing the work of a writer no one else knows." It held up an interesting mirror to the author and his deep criticism of so many attempts at doing the impossible. I wonder how anyone can criticize something that seems so hard. It’s like everyone sitting on the couch critiquing Ilia Malinin. I certainly cannot do a backflip on skates. As for yhe Loaf or Hot-Water Bottle article, I love the sentiment Davis ends on: "So that is just one example of how, in the course of a translation, as you explore all the possibilities before making a final decision, you go a considerable distance in a circle before ending up not far from where you started – but much better informed." There’s a theme here, these two works end in excellent places. For the other Proust works, I was curious about Hazzard pointing out "the attempts [of other translators besides Moncrieff], sometimes ingenious, sometimes desperate, merely to differ." Especially in our translation activities I find myself putting together some of the weirdest sentences I have ever formed in a bizarre effort not to plagiarize. Is it ever plagiarism in translation? Maybe that's not something I need to be worrying so much about. For Brian Nelson's Translator Note, I was struck by the sentiment: "The task of the translator is to get inside the author's skin." This is such a big concept to wrap my head around. I hope we can continue to discuss what exactly this means.
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