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CestMoi posted:Finding out what translation you like is entirely about feel. You read a bit of a few different ones online and go with the translation you feel like you could read for however long the book is. Poetry is hell to translate and no matter what version you choose there will be someone saying it's a disgrace to the original so basically don't worry about it beyond whatever criteria you set yourself. Noted. I guess my main problem is that I didn't research anything before picking it up and just trusted the text to be genuine because its in a published book which is very naive of me. May this be a lesson to all others (or maybe its just me who is the idiot). Having said all of this I do have to say that it is very nice poetry.
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Nov 20, 2017 13:15
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I read All Quiet on the Western Front for the first time this year and thoroughly loved every moment of it but this whole translation thing has made me really paranoid. Maybe I should just learn all the worlds languages and be done with it.
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Nov 20, 2017 13:22
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Burning Rain posted:god said to abraham, kill me a son, and abe said, man, you must be puttin' me on! I too have read Fear & Trembling
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Nov 20, 2017 13:26
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CestMoi posted:The guy he is reading doesn't read Persian, so probably doesn't have a whole lot of insights into why he chose certain representations of Rumi's meaning over others lmao i didnt catch that
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Nov 20, 2017 13:33
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also rumi is very popular with the kind of people who want to cure autism by strapping magnets to shoes to reverse the body's magnetic polarity. so i'd be pretty wary of translations of that one. i started reading lincoln in the bardo and it really is a very good novel. george saunders has an unbelievable talent for making really moronic premises form totally cohesive worlds.
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Nov 20, 2017 13:35
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Foul Fowl posted:also rumi is very popular with the kind of people who want to cure autism by strapping magnets to shoes to reverse the body's magnetic polarity. so i'd be pretty wary of translations of that one. i think rumi's popular with pretty much everybody? he's still one of the top-selling poets in the us, for instance, iirc. or is the claim here that, much like those copies of the bhagavad gita that hare khrisnas hand out, there are a lot of translations that take license with the text at the expense of promoting a specific kind of mysticism?
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Nov 20, 2017 13:51
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CestMoi posted:I too have read Fear & Trembling still my fav Amelie Nothomb book
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Nov 20, 2017 14:41
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I want to read more middle eastern poetry. anything in particular I should be looking for? sounds like Rumi's a good start. adding to that, if there's any translation of Nizar Qabbani to keep in mind, I'm all ears
ulvir fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Nov 20, 2017 |
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Nov 20, 2017 21:13
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ulvir posted:I want to read more middle eastern poetry. anything in particular I should be looking for? sounds like Rumi's a good start. adding to that, if there's any translation of Nizar Qabbani to keep in mind, I'm all ears If you want something more modern than your typical Persian Sufi, Adonis is a Syrian guy whose poetry is pretty widely regarded as being the best in the Arabic speaking world. Blood of Adonis is a nice collection, and if you ever see any essays by him pick them up cos they’re always about the history of Arab poetics which is a cool thing to know more than 0 things about
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Nov 20, 2017 23:58
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not that persian sufi poetry doesn't kick rear end
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Nov 21, 2017 02:44
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Did not mean 2 imply that for sure!!!!!!!
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Nov 21, 2017 04:51
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Wrageowrapper posted:I think I need to be a bit more careful when I buy translated books. I recently purchased a collection of Rumi without knowing anything about it him at all. While reading it I noticed that it all seemed rather modern for a 14th century Persian. Looking into it the "translator", Coleman Barks, simply updated already translated poems into something the average modern American could understand without scaring them by mentioning Islam. I was really enjoying it up until then but this sort of soured me a little. Is this a good way to translate poetry? How do you go about researching a translated text and what makes you chose one version over another? Try a newer translation, particularly if it's a language where scholarship has changed a lot recently or there's stuff that might be censored. E.g. Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese and Japanese works took a hacksaw to the structure. Also try to get a direct translation, not like the old Solaris which was translated from the French and Łem made fun of it for being bad. You can also, like, google the translator's name and the title.
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Nov 21, 2017 09:14
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CestMoi posted:If you want something more modern than your typical Persian Sufi, Adonis is a Syrian guy whose poetry is pretty widely regarded as being the best in the Arabic speaking world. Blood of Adonis is a nice collection, and if you ever see any essays by him pick them up cos they’re always about the history of Arab poetics which is a cool thing to know more than 0 things about thanks a bunch
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Nov 21, 2017 14:26
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Wrageowrapper posted:How do you go about researching a translated text and what makes you chose one version over another? publisher is a reasonable indication of trustworthiness. penguin classics are usually fine, but i'd trust the oxford world's classics line with my life. everyone who translates for that is a world-class scholar.
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Nov 21, 2017 15:57
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Safety Biscuits posted:Try a newer translation, particularly if it's a language where scholarship has changed a lot recently or there's stuff that might be censored. E.g. Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese and Japanese works took a hacksaw to the structure. Also try to get a direct translation, not like the old Solaris which was translated from the French and Łem made fun of it for being bad. Ah gently caress and I just checked, my Solaris translation is from the french.
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Nov 22, 2017 04:30
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Wrageowrapper posted:I think I need to be a bit more careful when I buy translated books. I recently purchased a collection of Rumi without knowing anything about it him at all. While reading it I noticed that it all seemed rather modern for a 14th century Persian. Looking into it the "translator", Coleman Barks, simply updated already translated poems into something the average modern American could understand without scaring them by mentioning Islam. I was really enjoying it up until then but this sort of soured me a little. Is this a good way to translate poetry? How do you go about researching a translated text and what makes you chose one version over another? drat, I just picked up the exact same translation at a charity thrift store for $2. I guess it wasn't a great find after all. Speaking of translations, are Michael Glenny's translations of Bulgakov any good? I wanted to check out Heart of Dog and that's the only translation my library has. I vaguely remember hearing not good things about his translations compared to others. Also is there a translation of Master and Margarita considered better (more poetic specifically) than Mira Grant's? That's the one I have, but when I decide to reread it I want to try out a different translation. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Nov 22, 2017 |
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Nov 22, 2017 04:50
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Zesty Mordant posted:Ah gently caress and I just checked, my Solaris translation is from the french. Yeah, the old translation was apparently a disaster. The new translation is only in ebook thanks to rights issues. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/15/first-direct-translation-solaris
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Nov 22, 2017 05:01
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Stuporstar posted:drat, I just picked up the exact same translation at a charity thrift store for $2. I guess it wasn't a great find after all. I read this one: https://www.amazon.com/Master-Margarita-Mikhail-Bulgakov/dp/0679760806 I can’t say whether it’s a good translation or not, but it was quite readable.
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Nov 22, 2017 05:12
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Heath posted:I read this one: https://www.amazon.com/Master-Margarita-Mikhail-Bulgakov/dp/0679760806 that's also the one i read and i liked it, and have heard bad things about some of the others
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Nov 22, 2017 07:08
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There’s also a fairly recent (from the last year or so IIRC) anniversary publication Penguin Classics Deluxe edition with a translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky. I haven’t read that one myself, and I’ve heard that in spite of how prolific they are that their translations aren’t great and tend to be over-literal. This article sums it up: https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/f...ast-slowed-down Some people swear by them, though, so take your pick.
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Nov 22, 2017 11:14
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Heath posted:I read this one: https://www.amazon.com/Master-Margarita-Mikhail-Bulgakov/dp/0679760806 I totally screwed up, it turns out that edition is exactly the one I have. Not the Mirra Ginsberg translation (and I also screwed up her name in my last post). I found the Diana Burgin translation serviceable, but it left me wanting something more. Specifically I didn't like how she translated Russian idioms into equivalent English cliches. I have a Russian friend who argued that's a good way to maintain the same flavor of a saying, because maybe the characters are meant to sound cliche in Russian the same way Polonius is meant to sound cliche in Hamlet, but my preference is for something more challenging than an overused phrase my eye is going to gloss over. My favorite translation of Russian anything is Natasha Randall's translation of Zamyatin's We, because his metaphors for every character were almost leitmotifs and utterly surreal in places.
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Nov 22, 2017 21:56
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chernobyl kinsman posted:i'd trust the oxford world's classics line with my life. everyone who translates for that is a world-class scholar. they're always really good at translation but sometimes absurdly bad at footnotes. I've just been reading through the fleurs du mal they published, and their team's just stuck in citations for every mythological figure mentioned. explaining what a sphinx is again and again
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Nov 22, 2017 22:55
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Just finished Julio Cortazar's beast of a novel Hopscotch. Really simple story told through an incredibly elaborate and entertaining narrative device.
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Nov 22, 2017 22:56
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VileLL posted:they're always really good at translation but sometimes absurdly bad at footnotes. I've just been reading through the fleurs du mal they published, and their team's just stuck in citations for every mythological figure mentioned. explaining what a sphinx is again and again Let's write a novel where a scholar becomes trapped in a loop of writing footnotes and begins to confront their own mortality
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Nov 22, 2017 23:49
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A human heart posted:Let's write a novel where a scholar becomes trapped in a loop of writing footnotes and begins to confront their own mortality i can't find the loosechanj post where they said they were excited to read house of leaves because there were a lot of blank pages so it would keep their page per day score high
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Nov 23, 2017 00:05
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A human heart posted:Let's write a novel where a scholar becomes trapped in a loop of writing footnotes and begins to confront their own mortality  
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Nov 23, 2017 01:06
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Mr. Fappy posted:Just finished Julio Cortazar's beast of a novel Hopscotch. Really simple story told through an incredibly elaborate and entertaining narrative device. I've been eyeing it on my shelf for a while. I wanted to get through his Literature Class first, so that I might have a better idea of what I was getting into. Should I read it in page order first or go ahead and use his recommended alternate order?
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Nov 23, 2017 03:40
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mdemone posted:I've been eyeing it on my shelf for a while. I wanted to get through his Literature Class first, so that I might have a better idea of what I was getting into. Page order would be weird i think because then all the plotless bits at the back will happen all at once instead of interspersed through the text, but he says that you can read it however you want so go wild.
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Nov 23, 2017 03:54
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I'm never going to read a novel in a different order than what it's printed in
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Nov 23, 2017 09:45
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I too will let a printer's mistake determine how I read a book
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Nov 23, 2017 10:22
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I've actually never come across a book where the pages were in the wrong order, only seen pages missing or doubled
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Nov 23, 2017 10:31
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Ras Het posted:I'm never going to read a novel in a different order than what it's printed in Read Pale Fire.
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Nov 23, 2017 11:17
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Ras Het posted:I've actually never come across a book where the pages were in the wrong order, only seen pages missing or doubled I've got an academic history book where like 15 pages are all jumbled up and out of order, made it a bit hard to read.
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Nov 23, 2017 11:46
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Heath posted:Read Pale Fire. But you can very easily do a linear read of Pale Fire.
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Nov 23, 2017 17:47
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Franchescanado posted:But you can very easily do a linear read of Pale Fire. Kind of a crappy read, though, unless you memorize the poem the first go.
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Nov 23, 2017 20:20
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Franchescanado posted:But you can very easily do a linear read of Pale Fire. Yes. And then you can read it again without.
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Nov 23, 2017 21:04
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You, a buffoon: Crime And Punishment, War And Peace. Two separate books that should be read in order Me, wise: Punishment And Peace And Crime War
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Nov 23, 2017 21:39
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at the date posted:Kind of a crappy read, though, unless you memorize the poem the first go. Not really. Most of the notes really don't have much to do with the poem, it's the narrator's interpretation of the poem and pretty much abandons any actual correlation after the 2nd section.
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Nov 23, 2017 21:41
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J_RBG posted:You, a buffoon: Crime And Punishment, War And Peace. Two separate books that should be read in order I actually have this habit of alternating between multiple books and I go back and forth on whether or not it's a good idea.
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Nov 24, 2017 05:40
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Since I'm in school, I don't have a choice. I'm required to be working through several long-ish works simultaneously, and whatever I'm reading for fun gets interrupted regularly to hit deadlines in the other books. I graduate in the Spring and cannot loving wait to be able to sit down and carefully read one long and dense book straight through. The Recognitions first, I'm thinking. It's been sitting on my desk for months, taunting me.
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Nov 24, 2017 05:52
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