Hi Club! <br><br>Here again, sorry if I can
stumble across this place just once a month... anyway,
I've seen very good posts, so maybe you don't need me
:-) <br><br><br>===========<br><br>** Deadly Toy **
<br><br>Bo:<br>Quite a password you have chosen for yourself
Marco<br><br>M:<br>Well, it was the name of the punk band I used to play
drums with, about twenty years ago.....
<br><br><br>==============<br><br>** TransLation ** <br>( Latin Trans=Across +
Latum,
past form of Ferre=To Carry. The same exact etymology
of TransFer ).<br><br>Sara: <br>The translator needs
to be sensitive to the culture of the original work
in order to understand it in the manner the author
hoped, and be able to make that 'sound right' by making
active sense to the reader in their mother tongue. Using
their own language's literary 'voice' and traditions is
a skill we all take for granted as one of the many
unsaid subjects we learn from introduction in childhood.
<br><br>M:<br>Indeed. And anyway I think it is a chimera to believe you
have really understood what the author was feeling and
meaning, even in your own tongue. You have rightly shown
it in these terms: <br><br>Sara: <br>[the] narrative
voice is infact a seperate entity and is created as a
conjunction between reader and writer, at the time of
reading. That's why a book can seem very different to us
when reading the same one years apart, or be very
meaningful to some and garbage to others! <br><br>M:<br>Yes,
in other words, the Quality of the novel I'm reading
occurs in the event when the reader and the writer meet.
<br><br>When we read a novel, we transfer it into our personal
*unique* culture, and actually the only novels everyone
agrees on are the novels with nothing to say (nothing to
transfer)! Of course the language barrier is a further
complication, as even the excellent translator can't be a
*transparent medium*. <br><br>An example of the difficulty of
a fair translation is in Lila. When Pirsig writes
"Good as a noun rather an adjective is all the MOQ is
about", I think the Italian translator has spent weeks to
translate this simple statement, the most important
statement of the whole book. In facts, in English, "Good"
is both an adjective (right, valid, honest...) and a
noun (welfare, profit, advantage, commodity); even if
the adjective is the main usage, I guess this
statement is clear to an English reader. But in Italian we
have two terms: "Buono" the adjective, and "Bene" the
noun. They have both the same etymology, of course, but
in our language the two terms have been in the past
separated. So, when I've read first that we should consider
"Buono" as an noun, the statement was a bit cryptic. Only
when I've seen it in English I understood there was
nothing of "mystic" in the sentence. But in Italian is
practically impossible to render transparently. <br><br>(TO
BE CONTINUED....)