Old friend Valerio kick started a conversation about trying to find a good English translation for Divine Comedy to give to a former colleague, and how difficult it is to translate something into another language.
I agreed, saying:
Quote
What instantly comes to mind is Chinese poetry (or such things in any language, for that matter).
I read something on this during my BA days at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) which used a couple of lines from a Chinese poem.
The most common metre in traditional Chinese poetry is 5 characters or 7.
Can’t remember now the exact text from the poem cited (about walking in a bamboo grove or something atmospheric like that), but the author said what is immediately understood/felt by the Chinese reader of the first couplet with its 5 characters per line will take lots more words to convey in English. It’s because of the cultural context: that’s the way the Chinese look at nature with certain phenomena instantly evoking certain responses, therefore no need to use too many words.
In prose, the translator doesn’t have to try to match the meter too much so the problem isn’t so bad.
Unquote
No comments:
Post a Comment