Three prefaces to Petrarch
In David Slavitt's preface, the main focus is curatorial. He makes a few notes about translation decisions before defending his reasoning for only translating the sonnets and shorter pieces. Mark Musa makes justifications for his punctuation choices, also offering us insight about the specific manuscript he worked from, and also shares an emphasis on preservation of the original "special effects" and sounds of Petrarch. David Young's intro tells us a lot about the resources he used and the collaborators involved, which I think paints a wonderfully communal picture of the translating process. It interests me that he felt the need to start out with notes on the art of translation in general. These prefaces seem like one of the places that translators use to talk it out, and reading them reminded me of David Foster Wallace's essay Tense Present about the arguments being had out in the introductions of dictionaries.
3 articles on The Vegetarian controversy
I appreciate Tim Parks' review of Deborah Smith's translation for its frankness, and I share the instinct that an award as major as the Man Booker International Prize ought to uphold pretty rigorous standards. In Smith's article, she alludes to cultural imperialism, differing cultural norms, and hegemony as factors informing why someone would disparage her receipt of the award, which I find very grandiose and ideological; some people didn't like her work and it seems like they have valid reasons. I think she was put in an unfortunate position though. The discussion, really, is about whether it's a good thing that the MBI "judges 'aren’t comparing the original and the translation and evaluating the process (the decisions, the ingenuities, the slips…) of going from the one to the other,” but are attempting “to evaluate the finished English-language work on their own terms.'"
I think it's reasonable to be wary about that method. It's worthwhile to consider the threshold at which a translation becomes an adaptation, or even just an "after" piece written on the same theme, especially given the resources available to modern day writers. Charse Yun's comparison of The Vegetarian with Pound's Cathay fell flat to me as waving away some very real concerns. I think we ought to hold translators to different standards than Ezra Pound a hundred years ago, who even then took pains to communicate the indirectness of his method, recognizing a difference between his work and that of translators versed in Chinese. Yun writes, for example: "But in some ways, the question is moot. Most readers of a translation will never read the original." In my mind that makes the question more pertinent; if readers won't interact with the original, isn't it a great act of trust for them to read a work that claims to represent something of that original, with that original author's name attached?
Deborah Smith's Infidelity
This article and the ideas about feminist translation that it furthers are interesting on their own terms, but register to me as a flattening of what sounds like a psychologically nuanced novel. If a translator is interested in significantly changing the content of the source material as a political act, I wonder why they would bother translating instead of just writing an essay responding to the work. I think Sun Kyoung Yoon is playing a lot of semantic games to make the act of translation more than it is, and in doing so preempting the role of a reader in understanding a creative work on its own terms. I felt similarly about Steiner's violent metaphors when they came up in class last week; these are vivid ways to talk about translation, but I think they only extend so far. I think, instead of rejecting the picture of writers "quibbling over syntax if that's only going to be a hindrance," Yoon has provided an example of doing exactly that. Maybe my strong reaction comes from these sentences, which to me read as highly patronizing: "Smith practices her feminism in her translation, by strengthening Han's own feminism and intervening in the source text from a feminist angle when it more clearly registers patriarchal Korean society. The British translator adapts the Korean feminism represented by the author for the gender politics of an Anglophone context." But then again, Han approves of Smith's translation, so it can't be so far off the mark.
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