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A war, or at least a brushfire, has broken out in a corner of Blogovia over the issue of translation. It was started by the naughty folks at the complete review, who vented some spleen about the whole idea of translation. To put it in a nutshell, as they did: “We hate translation.” This (understandably) annoyed the translator Gail Armstrong (of Open Brackets), who responded in an entry called “Incomplete”:

In two critiques, one of Robert Wechsler’s book, Performing without a stage – The art of literary translation and the other of William Gass’s Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, we’re instructed in, well, very little aside from and the reviewers’ propensity for self-indulgence and cliché:

We still prefer strictly literal translations, trying to mirror the original, and we’ll take a footnote explaining an unclear meaning over a more suitable but not literal translation of a word or sentiment any time.

This has been said many times before but I still don’t buy it. While the stance has merit, and would give all inveterate pedants a chubby, a novel rife with footnotes is not conducive to pleasurable reading. Eyes flicking back and forth between text and footnotes is a chore, and destroys the flow of the narrative. (Footnotes are like subtitles: annoyingly irresistible.)

Chris (at Polyglut) vehemently agreed with her, and the complete reviewers posted a long response to her strictures, accepting a point or two but standing firmly by their rant. The whole discussion is extremely interesting, and I hope other translators (Merm?) and users of translations will weigh in.

Addendum. Gertrude Stein puts in her two cents:

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Via Road to Surfdom (thanks, Tim!), a thought-provoking Letter to the Editor (of the Washington Post):

Saturday, May 17, 2003; Page A24
As part of its propaganda effort in Iraq, the reconstruction office is establishing a newspaper called al Sabah, which is translated as “the dawn” [“U.S. to Take Its Message to Iraqi Airwaves,” news story, May 11]. In fact, al sabah means “the morning”; the word for “dawn” is fajr. This is well known even among Muslims who don’t speak Arabic, because a chapter in the Koran is called “al Fajr,” and the first prayer of the day is the fajr, or dawn, prayer.
So morning, dawn—what’s the difference? Well, al Sabah also happens to be the name of the Kuwaiti royal family, as every Iraqi probably knows. News reports indicate that Iraqis already believe that Kuwaitis were behind the looting of their museums. Now they may be likely to believe that this new newspaper is sponsored by Kuwait.
Is that really the impression the reconstruction office wants to convey in this delicate political situation?
UMM ABDULLAH
Kuwait City

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Some time back I posted an entry about the people called Hmong in the U.S. and Miao in most other places. I’ve discovered a great site that has Miao mythical and historical narratives and songs both in translation and in the Miao syllabary with interlinear literal translations (pdf files). Anyone interested in the hill cultures of Southeast Asia should pay it a visit.

Via Laputan Logic, an informative 1993 essay by E. A. Hammel on “Demography and the Origins of the Yugoslav Civil War,” which discusses the ethnographic, linguistic, and religious history of the Balkans and finishes with some interesting speculations about empire and nationalism:

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Textkit is a language learning site which provides Greek and Latin grammars, reading material, classical e-books and other learning resources. (Via Avva.)

The Berkshire Eagle has an article today that goes into more detail about translation from Latin than any newspaper article I’ve seen in a long time. It seems that the motto of the town of Pittsfield (as well of Pittsburgh), “Benigno Numine,” has been translated by St. Joseph’s Central High School Latin teacher Kathleen Canning as “Under Protection of the Goddess.” The paper quotes her as saying that

benignus has masculine, feminine and nongender endings, and that “benigno” is the “neuter form” of the noun.

Because both words in the city motto contain endings with no specific gender, they could be used to refer to a “goddess,” Canning said.

I’ll be charitable here and assume the reference to the adjective benignus as a noun is the paper’s mistake and not Canning’s, but the idea of translating numen as “Goddess” is just silly, I don’t care what they told her in civics class. The story goes on to say that “Mary C. Quirk, who teaches Latin at Miss Hall’s School, found 17 possible translations for the city motto, ranging from ‘propitious divine will’ to ‘with kind-hearted favor or approval (of the gods),’ to ‘with benign power,’ to ‘by beneficent authority'”; any of them would be a great deal better. (Thanks for the tip, Leslie!)

Fred Clark of Slacktivist reports on the new parenthood of a pair of grackles nesting in his apartment building, and in the course of his report he quotes (from David Quammen) a use of the word “weedy” that I am unfamiliar with (and that does not appear in any of my dictionaries, including the OED):

What do fire ants, zebra mussels, Asian gypsy moths, tamarisk trees, maleleuca trees, kudzu, Mediterranean fruit flies, boll weevils and water hyacinths have in common with crab-eating macaques or Nile perch? Answer: They’re weedy species, in the sense that animals as well as plants can be weedy. What that implies is a constellation of characteristics: They reproduce quickly, disperse widely when given a chance, tolerate a fairly broad range of habitat conditions, take hold in strange places, succeed especially in disturbed ecosystems, and resist eradication once they’re established. They are scrappers, generalists, opportunists. They tend to thrive in human-dominated terrain because in crucial ways they resemble Homo sapiens: aggressive, versatile, prolific, and ready to travel.

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When I was living in Taiwan I became familiar with the “four-character idioms” (chengyu) the Chinese love to toss into conversations. (A selection involving animals, with the related stories, can be found in this article from Chinese Monthly; scroll down past the Chinese text for the English version.) Now I learn, via No-sword, that similar idioms occur in Japanese, where they are called yojijukugo; see this article in the Japan Times‘s Kanji Clinic. At the end is a collection of such sayings from both Japanese and Chinese.

Which is to say, Sorrow not, sage! I borrow the alliterative words of the worthy Beowulf to welcome Songdog and Renee to the ranks of the officially sage; congratulations to both of you on well-deserved master’s degrees. You may now be addressed as “snotor guma” on any and all occasions.

An article by Andrée Brooks in today’s NY Times discussing the excavation of long-forgotten Jewish settlements (the Jews were expelled from southern Italy in the 16th century) contains the following remarkable information:

What is striking is that the inscriptions on the burial slabs found to date are almost totally in Greek. There is little or no Hebrew. When Hebrew is used, the characters mostly spell out Greek or Latin words. Both Greek and Latin were commonly used in that part of Italy at the time. This suggests an assimilated life for the Jews who may have lived here outside Venosa between the third and seventh centuries A.D. “Our Jews were not separated from everyone else in those early centuries,” said Dr. Cesare Colafemmina, visiting professor of Hebrew and Hebraic literature at the University of Calabria.

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