2/11 Reading Responses - Samantha Makishima

 On "Loaf or Hot Water Bottle":

The translator talked about using deliberate ignorance to approach their first translation of the text which I thought interesting. Often times when I am reading something, I want to at least read the synopsis written by the author to get a sense of what the story is about, however there have been moments where I felt that doing so has taken away some of the interest in reading the book/text in and of itself strangely enough. While I don't think this is completely analog to what the translator was referring, I believe that I understand the reasoning behind wanting to do a blind translation so to speak. It also helps with the question of what to do if there isn't much to research about the author for a particular text, at least partially I think. Similarly, the notion of not wanting other translations to color the translators interpretation of the text is interesting, as this is something I felt difficult to work around in our translation exercises that we are doing for class.

On "Translating Proust":

Something that I have been thinking about as I am reading these translator's notes, articles, etc. is also the idea of translating the style (eloquence, etc.) of the original versus attempting to stick as close to the meaning of the original as possible. It seems to me to be a somewhat difficult to balance tight rope in many cases. The conversation about Moncrieff's translation compared to subsequent revisions also reminds me of other books I have read where the first, "pioneering" translation was in some cases inaccurate or woefully heavy handed in the cutting of content but retained the feeling of the original---whereas the later translations, while far more close to the original in some ways, lost the ease and charm of the original translation in some regard. They brought up "version fatigue" as well at the end, I think that this reflects back to the "Loaf or Hot Water Bottle" reading where the translator deliberately chose not to read the previous translations before writing their first draft.

On "Brian Nelson's Translator's Note":

The translator brings up the idea of foreignization in their translator's note, and in this case he seems to imply how strictly using foreignization in terms of translating Proust's style could be inappropriate due to how the original French was already atypical. Hence, foreignization would in some sense be forcing the text to conform rather than a proper homage to the original. (At least that's what I took away from the text) Given that foreignization was a topic during our first guest lecture, it is interesting to see how the concept shows up here continues to add nuance to idea of translating style.