/lit/ and its pseudo menace

cool troll threzzzzzz

A translation can be better than the original. Russian literature is better in English.

>>9587999
So how come the translations aren't the masterpiece instead of the original work?

>>9587984
>Odissey, Iliad, The Divine Comedy
Reading these in 2017 as opposed to in the time at which they were written is a radical departure in its own right. It's so radical a departure, in fact, that whichever language you choose to read them in is inconsequential.

>>9588004
They are but pseuds cling to the myth of authorship. Sad!

>>9588006
So why don't we just burn them then? The modern man could never understand them

>>9588009
omg i hate copyright now

>>9588015
The translations belong to the translators

>>9587999
>Russian literature is better in English.
I hope you haven't read anything translated by, *shudders,* Constance Garnett?


“The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.”

Garnett’s flaws were not the figment of a native speaker’s snobbery. She worked with such speed, with such an eye toward the finish line, that when she came across a word or a phrase that she couldn’t make sense of she would skip it and move on. Life is short, “The Idiot” long. Garnett is often wooden in her renderings, sometimes unequal to certain verbal motifs and particularly long and complicated sentences. The typescripts of Nabokov’s lectures, which he delivered while teaching undergraduates at Wellesley and Cornell, are full of anti-Garnett vitriol; his margins are a congeries of pencilled exclamations and crabby demurrals on where she had “messed up.” For example, where a passage in the Garnett of “Anna” reads, “Holding his head bent down before him,” Nabokov triumphantly notes, “Mark that Mrs. Garnett has decapitated the man.” When Nabokov was working on a study of Gogol, he complained, “I have lost a week already translating passages I need in ‘The Inspector General’ as I can do nothing with Constance Garnett’s dry shit.”

A less imperious but no less discerning critic, Kornei Chukovsky (who was also a famous writer of children’s books), esteemed Garnett for her work on Turgenev and Chekhov. The famous style of “convulsions” and “nervous trembling,” he wrote, becomes under Garnett’s pen “a safe blandscript: not a volcano, but a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner—which is to say a complete distortion of the original.”

>>9588032
see hence why it's clearly superior to its original work, it's written by an anglosphere citizen just like us, slavs are clearly subhuman

>>9588032
The only criticism I see of Garnett in all that is her renderings did not fit what those critics considered to be the aura of the original. They are criticizing her for being original, and true to her audience. Many Russian constructions are simply nonsense in English and what's more "holding his head he bowed" is perfectly intelligible to a native English speaker. Nabokov stole his most famous book from a less famous author (Fyodor Sologub-The Petty Demon) but he snubs other forms of mimesis; a sort of defense mechanism of his I suppose.

>>9588049
Btw Sologub's The Petty Demon is about a posh professor having a love affair with an under age girl. It is an example of the genre "poshlost" or "posh lust". Lolita was written specifically to appeal to the indignity of its anglophone audience. Nabokov was a charlatan.

>>9588006
This, you really think you can even grasp the implications of the language in use, if you were to, for example, learn Ancient Greek? When literally everything, even basic emotions, had wildly different associations and implications, as well as a completely alien culture. You would largely project your Modern English definitions onto the language, you are the pseud if you think you're actually grasping it in it's intended state. We don't even have enough info on Ancient Greeks to train ourselves to do so, either.

>>9587984
Yep. Not a patrician personally but I understand enough nip to notice anime translators changing the meaning or tone of things, there's no way the same isn't rampant in novels which are so much larger and harder to translate.

>spend years learning Ancient Greek, Old English, Latin, Italian, French, German, and Russian
>never have time to read the books

>>9587999
I'm trying to read Notes from the Underground in the original Russian, but the narrator sounds nothing short of loathsome. I hate Dostoyevsky's voice so much. It makes me want to punch him.

Also Solzhenitsyn in Russian: don't even attempt this.

>>9588032

t. I'm 19 and got into literature 6 months ago and can count the number of novels I've read on one hand and started with 19th century russian lit because I too am a a great man and no one realizes it and on a whim I decided to google "best translation" and lapped up the first spoon-fed opinion I stumbled upon and my level of self-awareness is so low that I think regurgitating it on lit is insightful

>>9588032
FIRE OF MY LOINS

>>9589368
do you even know what "t." means or do you just use it because you saw other people use it in a similar but more nuanced way?

I'm not sure about the classics but I really don't believe in poetry translation. The rhythm, the sound, the music, all the effort of the poet often goes down the drain.

>>9589552
This is true, and its sad how difficult it would be to read all of the greatest poets in their original languages. That being said, a good translator puts in massive amounts of effort to create a work which has a similar poetic voice to the original and also keeps the concepts of the writer as close to that portrayed in the original work as possible. So its still worth reading translated poetry, you can still get a lot out of it, you just have to understand you won't have the same experience as one who read the original work. And heck, maybe some translations are able to even surpass the original due to differences in language allowing for more effective rendering of certain sentiments.

>>9587984
to be fair reading the divine comedy in translation is much better than reading 99.9% of books in ones own native language, whatever that may be

>>9589135
fansubs are also littered with flagrant typos and formatting errors; book translators do a better job. You can also compare multiple translations

>>9589529
>do you even know what "t." means
It's short for tfw

>>9588032
>I hope you haven't read anything translated by, *shudders,* Constance Garnett?

I remember quite a few threads about Constance Garnett. Unfortunately, I listened to a TBK audiobook written by Garnett before I was made aware of how awful her translations were. I read Crime and Punishment in my very early teens and can't remember who the translator was. I believe it was a Penguin classic. I have two copies of Notes From the Underground on my kindle, and I can't begin reading either because they differ way too much from each other. I've been meaning to make a thread about that. And neither are translated by Garnett. The only two Tolstoy's I've read are Anna and Ivan Ilyich, again nether by Garnett. Upon reading her translations next to others, though, she really does seem bland and lifeless.

>>9589701
So, wich translation is good?

>>9589686
Came here to say this is wrong
t. Is like "regards,"
But derived from Spurdo

>>9589368
This.

Anyone who has read Garnett's Anna Karenina or Brothers K knows that they're damn good

>>9591857
Pretty sure you took the bait my dude

>>9588032
Wtf I hate Garnett now

>>9589160
tfw you know you got to find compromises

The Odyysey and Illad were told via oral tradition and didn't nessecarily get told the exact same way every time even in their original language and thus are unusually friendly to translation.

The Divine Comedy is probably moderately better in its untranslated form but I wouldn't know.

Translations can result in works better than the original, just like how foreign voice actors can sometimes end up outperforming the original voice actor.

>>9587999
Unbelievable degree of ignorance. Babel in translation is a mere shadow of the original prose

>>9587999
I agree with the first part of the post. Because you see, a translation uplift the mediocre and average the genius, specially when they are masters of they language.