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🦋 The nature of the language
Another nice line from Jonathan Galassi, from the translation panel: Peter was saying something I feel, which is that when you look at a line of poetry in another language, it has -- all the secrets and the music and the magic of it are right there in the actual words, and I feel, I maintain that you can inhale that and know that even if you don't know a word of what it is, that somehow the nature of the language is right there...
The translator is a proselytizer and philanthropic in that sense, is that's where he's working for someone else, as well as himself, for this other person that he's identified with in some way.
Cole:
And that's part of the pleasure and neurosis of it all, a sort of that giving out and resentment, we all know about...
Galassi:It's like writing a biography of someone -- there's a period where the biographer always hates the subject. Cole:
Well with mediæval literature I think it's more like writing a novel, because you're creating a fictional character; nobody knows who that mediæval writer is... but definitely that sort of transference.... [Freud] said dreams are translations, in his letter to Fleiss, he said that psycho-neurosis is brought about by a failure to translate certain materials, and that repression brings about that failure, because we are reluctant to enter into the displeasure that the labor of translation brings on. -- I know that feeling! Grossman:
Well I do transference better than anybody else, because I fall in love with every writer I translate. And I know the deepest insight into the natures of those people; beginning with Cervantes, and on up. And I have never hated the writer. There have been times when I say I'm never getting off of page 371; I'm gonna spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to translate this page; but always I've felt such a deep connection to the writer.
posted evening of Friday, February 6th, 2009
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