I really enjoyed both of the translation lectures. I loved hearing Tiang’s reflections on a translation truism; “that as a translator you have to be invisible. If you’ve done your job right, people won’t even know you’ve been there, like a ninja. But if that’s the case, then how will we ever make a claim for our profession?” He later brings in the quotation from Kretzmer’s 2013 New Yorker interview, “‘Translation’— the very word I rebut and resent, because it minimizes the genuine creativity that I bring to the task.” These questions of invisibility and humility (and at times, borderline servitude) were ones I contemplated a lot in my social work career.
Senelick offered another layer when thinking of translated, “What is being translated is not Russian per se, but Chekhov’s wielding of Russian.” I tried to hold this idea while doing my Lorca translation this week along with his other idea of putting “the text into a state of crisis” (although I’m not sure I totally understood what he meant by this, would love if we discussed this concept further). From Frayn’s reading I reflected most on how censorship can impact our experience of a text in translation, and the importance of being an expert in language and medium when approaching a translation (I’ve really been feeling my lack of poetry training in this class). As for the Pavis, I got a little lost, but I liked the proposed epistemological break joining mise-en-scene and psychoanalysis against the possibility of being faithful.
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