Feb 11 Post - Ellie

I agree with Lydia Davis’ perspective on translating, staying as close to the source text as possible. I think that a more literal translation is necessary in a literary work, rather than an interpretation that changes the tone of the work. Even though a work that flows nicely might sell better, I believe that it is less faithful to the work, and therefore less useful to the work as a whole, in terms of reach and message. For example, if a work I am interpreting has a very plain style purposefully, then changing that into a poetic style erases the original author’s voice, which is not something I personally want to avoid while translating. 

Also, I related to the part in the reading about translation fatigue, or being aware of previous translations of the work, and not knowing whether or not my translation would be useful to the conversation. I have only translated works that do not have widely known translations, and the work that I picked for my project has no previous translations as far as I know. However, I was considering attempting to retranslate something that I knew already had a translation, because perhaps I could have done it better, but ultimately I decided that it was more worthwhile to do a new translation, even though the other translation of the work had widely criticized issues. However, there was also the risk of the other translation living in my head and my being unable to part from the other work.