Response to 2/4 - Mary

 First: Petrarch. I enjoyed how the several different translators approached the question of form. Slavitt thought that rhyme was necessary to convey the hypnotic quality of the Italian, but altered the rhyme scheme to allow for more variability because of English's poor rhyming words compared to Italian. Musa, on the other hand, wrote that he didn't want to sacrifice the movement and meaning of verse to "the tyranny of rhyme". Tyranny of rhyme! Yet he kept the meter. And Young--whose introduction I liked the most and found the most "persuasive" of whose translation I would want to read--kept meter to "keep [him] alert" but allowed the flexibility of assonance and internal rhyme to replace end rhymes so that he could "stay close to Petrarch's diction, syntax, and tone." I also loved that Young noted that he thought it was important that poems are translated by poets... a bias, maybe :)

This brings me to the articles on Han Kang's "The Vegetarian" translated by Deborah Smith. Yun's analogy of the translation as imagining "the plain, contemporary style of Raymond Carver being garnished with the elaborate diction of Charles Dickens" is similar to Parks' examples of "this mix of the uptight and the colloquial" in the translations, and the overall nineteenth-century ring (eg, the awkward silences peppering the conversation). I was very persuaded with Parks note that when reading a translation where you do not know the original language, you can consider "the relationship between content and style in the English translation. In a literary text a certain content manifests itself in a certain style. There is no separating the two." This was what alerted Parks' with the incongruence and left him with a dramatic conclusion about the prize, but, to be honest, not one I completely disagree with. And I was not persuaded by Smith's note that translating from Korean to English means translating into a language that "favors precision, concision, and lyricism." That's not how I would describe the best modern English novels, necessarily, and given that this was a modern work it seems strange to have that view of English.