Translation is not only a means to survive in a foreign country, but it also a story of addiction and frustration. These have nothing to do with drugs and alcohol, but they deal with "language exploration." Like addiction, a traslated word drags other words that wait to be translated, and so on until an entire phrase, sentence, or paragraph is poured into another language. It is funny, to some extent. It is compelling, but also frustrating because words and language are intangible. That is, people give words their meanings, and they change with time. Translators are always concerned with how to get close to the meaning they want to convey. Words and their significances depend on the context. While for a native speaker such context may be intrinsic, for a foreigner the many nuances a term bear are not so explicit. This difficulty is at the core of the experience of a writer who wants to translate even a simple written work.
To translate themselves into another language, writers must rape the foreign idiom. That is, they have to uproot the words from the text and observe them as if they were a Michelangelo’s statue. After that, writers must make peace with them and treat them with pure respect as if they became their own words, their own children. Only in this case, probably it will be more a harmony of languages than a mere transplant of nouns.
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2 comments:
Anna, that was eloquently written and I really enjoyed some of the analogies you used. Perhaps you may have been lost in translation in the past, but you surely are not now.
The pitfalls of translation are exactly why we need people like you who straddle the borders between two languages and can understand the nuances of both. Great post!
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