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🦋 Mistranslation

This is the epigraph in front of Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle:

To imagine that a person who intrigues us has access to a way of life unknown and all the more attractive for its mystery, to believe that we will begin to live only through the love of that person -- what else is this but the birth of great passion?

Marcel Proust, from the mistranslation of Y.K. Karaosmanoğlu

This seems really intriguing to me: Pamuk is quoting a mistranslation into Turkish of a French text (and presumably a real, historical mistranslation), which has subsequently been (who knows, possibly mis-?)translated into English! (This book is translated by Victoria Holbrook, a new name to me -- it will be interesting to see how her rendering of Pamuk's work compares with that of Maureen Freely and of Erdağ Göknar.)

I'm not familiar with Proust and have no way of knowing what the correct translation of the quoted bit is -- not really something I can look up via Google. I wonder...

posted afternoon of Thursday, January 17th, 2008
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Some answers are being found by helpful people such as Julie L. and TexAnne at Making Light today... KaraosmanoÄŸlu's mistranslation is

Alakamızı uyandıran bir kimseyi,bizce meçhul ve meçhullüğü derecesinde cazibeli bir hayatın unsurlarına karışmış sanmak ve hayata ancak onun sevgisiyle girebileceğimizi düşünmek bir aşk başlangıcından başka neyi ifade eder?

The original passage is

Que nous croyions qu'un être participe à une vie inconnue où son amour nous ferait pénétrer, c'est, de tout ce qu'exige l'amour pour naître, ce à quoi il tient le plus, et qui lui fait faire bon marché du reste.

of which one English rendering is,

All that love requires to be born is that we should believe that a being participates in an unknown life in which our love will enables us to penetrate.

and another is

Once we believe that a fellow-creature has a share in some unknown existence to which that creature's love for ourselves can win us admission, that is, of all the preliminary conditions which Love exacts, the one to which he attaches most importance, the one which makes him generous or indifferent as to the rest.

Also, Minne G. de Boer mentions this matter in her paper, Quatre châteaux blancs. Comparaison des traductions romanes du roman Beyaz Kale d’Orhan Pamuk, delivered at the XXV^e Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes.

posted evening of July 6th, 2011 by Jeremy

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