The objective of a translator should be to retain the spirit of the original, and have the translated piece stand on its own two feet as a work of literature. This is why Ezra Pound and Christopher Logue were such good translators.
Pound translated into English the Analects of Confucius, a bunch of Noh Plays, and many other works of Chinese and Japanese literature. But he was barely capable of reading Chinese or Japanese at all. He was provided with rough word-for-word translations by friends like Ernest Fenollosa, and he translated those into literature.
Logue didn't know any Ancient Greek, but his rendition of a part of the Iliad is probably the greatest achievement of late 20th century poetry. He simply re-worked the (many) existing English translations into something more lyrical and contemporary. In effect, he reinterpreted the existing body of translations -- and, in his own way, heightened their effect, and captured much of the spirit of the original.
I find that most translations -- especially of poetry -- tend to be altogether too mechanical. Pound and Logue had it figured out.
> The objective of a translator should be to retain the spirit of the original, and have the translated piece stand on its own two feet as a work of literature.
If I want to read inspired Ezra Pound or Christopher Logue, that's the way. If I want to read Confucius, I get a lot of Ezra Pound mixed in, and in a way that is impossible for me to distinguish one from the other. The same goes for wanting to read Homer and getting a lot of Logue.
(For Confucius, Arthur Waley was both leading translator and poet, and Waley's translations are highly recommended for their knowledge of the original and their English poetry.)
1) contract/legal/diplomatic translation: capture the meaning as exact as possible, even if that means the translation is boring and double, or even ten times the length of the original.
2) literary translation: translate to keep things interesting and engaging. EVEN where that means changing the meaning, order, ... of things. Making some changes to accomplish that can be acceptable, for example changing the behavior of a polite character or a policeman or a person of authority to match expected behavior for those kinds of people in the target country. Matching the structure of the original text is just not a concern at all.
The translation itself should be a literary work. Obviously not separate from the original, but not 100% the same either. 95% the same, with the remaining 5% providing maximum "flavor".
3) educational translation: depending on the level of the reader, evolve from literal translation, even putting the words in the wrong order for the target language just to match the original text as closely as possible, or leaving some words untranslated. Slowly evolve towards more "interesting" translation. In any case keep the structure, sequence and word use of the original text 100%.
4) conversational translation: translate as quickly as possible, for example not waiting for complete sentences to start translating. Try to get feedback going between both speaker and listener, as the purpose is having them communicate, not having exact translation, or interesting translation. Just translate 5 words at a time, even when they don't form complete sentences.
Once or twice I have 'translated translations' of Chinese movie subtitles. The basic translation done by a Chinese native who speaks Engkish, with my contribution being to bash the English into shape. I do this in discusiion with the director. I wish more subtitles were done in this way. Rubbish subtitles are endemic in the industry.
I encountered this with Hero, when the single giant calligraphy character that is critical to the film had a different subtitle in the cinema and on the DVD. One of these days I'd love to read a deep dive into how that aspect of the film is understood by native speakers. Which I suspect might be longer than the film itself, dealing as it does with the politics of Chinese unity.
I see that in other places too. I fear it reduces the films to the level of camp. Do the directors not think it matters? Do they not have easy access to fluent speakers of English?
It takes more than a fluent speaker to write good literature. And that's the rub - you need someone who is themselves capable of writing good literature, regardless of whether it's original or a translation of an existing work.
I have seen this more in art house movies and frankly cant understand why it is not a larger issue. I once offered this service to a director I liked, only for him to refuse it. His final subtitles were atrocious.
Nah. If you want to write an original work of literature, write an original work of literature. If you're writing a translation, it should reflect the original, good and bad, and you absolutely need to understand the original language to do that.
There is no perfect translation. Different translations have different aims and that's ok. I love Anne Carson's translations of Sappho but I always give the caveat that she takes a lot of liberties with Sappho when I recommend it to a friend. Having a more literal, dry, translation is fine too.
I stumbled upon War Music after discarding (almost) every other translation of the Iliad because the translators cleary didn't get it. Sure, they could talk about Homeric epithets for days and knowingly reference the "wine dark sea," but the actual ethic and humanity of the Iliad eluded them. And when you do get those aspects (as Logue did), the actual choice of idiom by the translator becomes irrelevant, whereas if you don't get them, no matter how "technically accurate" the idiom is, it's just farcical. To my mind, these ersatz translations become the Homeric equivalent of English as She Is Spoke.
> I stumbled upon War Music after discarding (almost) every other translation of the Iliad because the translators cleary didn't get it
Homer's world is very alien to ours. I realized at one point, reading the Odyssey, that it is myself who didn't get it. There was a chasm between me and Homer, and if I wanted read and understand Homer in a meaningful way, I was going to have to cross it.
Unless I have personal expertise, how can I evaluate who 'gets it', Logue or others?
As someone who can read Ancient Greek, Homer is unlike anything we have in English. No translation can "get it." It's oral poetry meant to be performed for hours at a time with a bunch of repetitive stock phrases. I don't feel like I "get it" reading it in Greek. It's absolutely beautiful but even when I read it in Greek, I feel like there's this huge gulf between me and the context it which it was created. I think you should just choose whatever translation you find beautiful but there's also value if someone wants to read something that's worded more closely to the Greek.
I had wondered why Pound went fascist when he seemed so open at the start of his career, doing all these translations. Although I couldn't find "the gentleman who wrote a 'translation' by avoiding the work of translating" in Dorothy Thompson's party game in Harper's, it does seem to explain it nicely.
>What's your explanation of why Pound went Fascist?
I'm not sure I particularly have one; I haven't read any of his longer political or cultural (i.e. non-literary) works. I just think it's silly to correlate an approach to translation that you dislike with fascism. Especially as I'm not sure it even makes sense on its own terms: I can only read your comment as 'lazy translator? Figures that he would be a fascist', but if I imagine the type of translation a fascist would approve of, the approach I picture is fastidious, fussy, concerned with fidelity to the point of stickler-ishness. (Isn't that from where we get 'grammar nazi'?)
And oh, well, since you ask I'll take a shy at it: my vague sense is that he became fascist because saw a society in decline due to it becoming more and more a sham society: opulence without virtue, power without vigour, money no longer tied to actually existing goods. (Of course, all of this shades easily into antisemitism.) He saw fascism as the answer; It's easier to see in retrospect that it wasn't.
Maybe I put my comment poorly because what I wrote 4 years ago is still in my head. I had had a working hypothesis that xenophilia is antifascistic. (how about comedy? Fascism produced "Lili Marleen", but did it produce any comedians?)
My big Q was: if Pound was such a xenophile (as I had thought) when young, why did he turn to Fascism when older?
TIL that he wasn't ever xenophilic; he only dealt with the other once it had been transmuted into the familiar and he could work it on his own terms. (thus restoring my working hypothesis)
I don't know if that works out: A lot of people on the right I know are quite xenophilic in the sense of having a deep interest in other cultures etc, though not indiscriminately so.
The difference between them and much of the left is that they've come to reject oikophobia as wrong and are consciously oikophilic when it comes to their own culture and ethnicity, while the leftist configuration is oikophobic/xenophilic.
(Not to say there aren't oikophilic/xenophobic people, but I feel like that's more often an unthinking stance)
(note that it's not always easy being parochially oikophilic if your sympatriots[0] sometimes say things like "no, where are you really from?". Oἶκος strictly speaking referred to the family[1]; some people consider their οἶκος[2] to be less, others, more, inclusive)
[0] did latin pick up patria from greek or are they cognate?
[1] so pedantically "home ec" should be unmarked and "national economy" the marked term.
[2] presumably "kith and kin" is not redundant; which class is larger?
There's a lot - all the "Death to America" rhetoric, white liberals being okay with other ethnicities openly advocating for their interests but whites doing so being gigabad. Generally refusing to act in the best interests of existing citizens vs. even illegal immigrants, or refusing to uphold laws out of care for the supposedly downtrodden with the result that cities turn into shitholes. celebrating old achievements of their own civilization being cringe, while celebrating those of other cultures' being lauded.
This does not mean the white liberals don't act in their own interest - their policies wrt eg. black schooling are some of the most heinous works of sabotage you could imagine, but the cloak it as compassion. More graduations and admissions, but less people able to actually read or do math.
Do you have any examples that are not strawmen? (I mean, they may not be strawmen to you, but they're not at all credible to me; surely we can find something which we both agree is an actual thing?)
Seeing that this discussion is still going on (I'm impressed!) I shall provide an example which I believe fits the bill. Around the time you first asked the question I learnt that the BBC are currently re-airing a classic documentary series of theirs, Civilisation, by Kenneth Clarke. This is essentially a history of post-classical European civilisation from the end of the dark ages to the present day. The programme is what we would now call eurocentric in its focus, and it does celebrate that european culture, but it certainly doesn't denigrate any other, or claim that that of Europe is greater than any other. Nonetheless the BBC felt it necessary in rebroadcasting it to prepend a warning that the programme reflects the 'standards and attitudes of its time'[0]. What views are these which the BBC feels it necessary to disclaim? One can only assume it is the attitude of celebrating rather than denigrating western culture and history. The programme must not go out without warnings lest anyone get the impression that we appreciate our own civilisation! I believe that that can fairly be called oikophobia.
[0] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-the-bbc-censuring... They also commissioned a ten-minute preface talk by Mary Beard but as I couldn't watch this myself (it's only on the BBC iplayer for which I will not sign up) I shall refrain from comment.
As a lagniappe (not a word we have in my country, by the way), I share this rather cruel Pound story which may nonetheless, as it did me, amuse you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auberon_Waugh#Waugh.27s_views (2nd paragraph, or look for 'Pound')
Thanks! I have Civilisation in hardcopy, so that sounds like a perfect example. (unfortunately I'm on holiday atm so my reply will come much later)
Bron's father's prose from Brideshead rather sums up (with the necessary change in brackets) why I may come across as oikophobic at times:
> ...we had been through it together, the [Old Country] and I ... until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the reconciliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively ... I learned ... the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying.
(it is reassuring to see in WP that the elder Waugh's second marriage, like his second confession —despite Vatican II?—, stuck for life)
EDIT: looks like many "BBC Four Classic Documentaries Collection" programs of the last century get the same treatment, from:
> Programmes are selected, in part, for their historical context and reflect the broadcast standards and attitudes of their time, which may not accord to some current BBC editorial guidelines. We aim to select programmes which can be shown in their entirety but in some cases edits are required.
I'd assume nudity wouldn't be a problem in context, either then or now, but transverberation content like The Ecstasy of St. Teresa may run afoul of contemporary self-harm guidelines?
>looks like many "BBC Four Classic Documentaries Collection" programs of the last century get the same treatment
Fair enough, it may be that the warning is just a generic one slapped on all their old repeats, but I do think that commissioning a new ten minute introduction from Mary Beard is going above and beyond. I haven't seen it so didn't want to speak too much on it, but from what I gathered it's a mixture of measured praise and blame for Clarke's eurocentrism.
>I have Civilisation in hardcopy
It's a good series, I would recommend it if you haven't already seen it. (My biggest gripe with the BBC rebroadcasting it is that it prompted them to take down from youtube the copy I was in the middle of watching!) By the way, for a more xenophilic production of similar scope, you might wish to take a look at The Silk Road[0].
I think there's a distinction to be made between having an interest in other cultures and being accepting of other cultures. Not sure if oikophilia is defined that precisely or not.
Seeing other cultures as something to be studied or understood is something even the xenophobic can be drawn to, if nothing else to size up the enemy (see all of the "studies" done by the Nazis on the "untermenschen")
That is sort of what I mean: They care first and foremost for their own, but do not really hate different people: They just want their own place, for themselves, and used to have that but mass immigration policies in effect destroy that, and the rhetoric to justify them in effect say they don't have a right to their own place.
So they are self-first, but interested in and appreciative of those who are different. They just wish to stay themselves, as well. You can see it in eg. the architecture accounts on Twitter: They'll readily post Islamic architecture, Asian architecture and those people's local solutions to their environmental issues, but they also insist European solutions and culture be accorded at least equal value. And a lot of the people running them certainly don't want millions of Islamists on their shores, their appreciation is less for modern Islam and more for the old golden ages when they were a center of high civilization.
The left doesn't think the first desire of their own place as it used to be is valid, of caring for themselves first is valid, but they do like other cultures (or at least the injection of foreign influences into their own, which they have a dim view of). The left, while it accords primacy to the other over what's traditionally their people's, don't really look up to foreign cultures in some ways - they do try to change them to be western woke leftist in character in their interactions, even if they hold them in higher regard than the culture of the leftists' native countries.
How does staying oneself have anything to do with what other people do?
(I'm failing to see the how we get to "in effect say they don't have a right to their own place". My understanding of the leftist position is that everyone has a right to their own place.)
(I'm all in favour of people's freedom to swing their fists about, as long as they're avoiding other peoples' faces)
This is why there are SO many translations of the Tao Te Ching. Some are very mechanical, others miss the point entirely. And then there are those one where it is almost like Poetry, they went beyond just the immediately presented content.
To that I would recommend the translation of it by Red Pine (Bill Porter), not only is is a wonderful translation but it does so much to add additional context via others commentary on the chapters through out the ages.
I'm quite proficient in German and English, but still translating is astonishing hard, even into my mother tongue Spanish. The translation always sounds weird. I'm always in awe at great translations.
When I read translated texts (or watch dubbed films) I always catch false friends or awkward translations, and I "see" the original through the translation like it was a leaky abstraction. It's so tricky even the pros make a lot of mistakes.
This is why I no longer watch dubbed movies, especially because those translations often try to mimick the mouth movements rather than the actual meaning.
In Italy a “pepperoni” pizza is translated as “pizza ai peperoni”, which is “bell pepper pizza”
I feel that I am very sensitive to "translations sounding like translations". A feeling of "that isn't quite how a native person would say that, but I can't really identify what's wrong". My mother tongue is Dutch, and the strange thing is that with the strong influence of the English language, even a lot of content written in Dutch today sounds like it was translated from English. I find it really hard to explain it clearly though. Does anyone else feel the same and maybe knows what causes it?
'translationese' is a pretty common term for it. when you translate, it's really easy to mirror the source structure/syntax even when there's more idiomatic ways to say it in the target language.
Exactly. One simple example that I see all the time comes to mind:
In English, "dozens of ____s" is a very common expression, particularly in news articles. In my local language, even though we do have a word for "dozen", it's much more common to say that in the form of "tens of ____s". Most of the "dozens of ____s" I see written in my language are from news articles that were (badly) translated from English.
English uses "dozens" in more situations than Dutch uses "tens", also because "tens" in Dutch is a three-syllable word. It's often just not idiomatic
I often find myself having started a sentence in Dutch that I can't finish without borrowing something from English, and I remember a recent example actually involved the word "dozens" (although I forgot what the sentence was about so I can't reproduce it here). That sentence should have been constructed entirely differently, but I now use English in my day-to-day communications at work, at home, and also most online ones so some stuff slips through.
It blew my mind some months ago when I used an English saying, perfectly translated (no loan words, good sentence structure), but entirely nonexistent in Dutch. I can't ever have heard anyone said it but it came out without any thought. The person I was talking to is also proficient in English and understood what I meant, but whether or not their face gave something away, it took me five seconds to realize what I had said. I guess the brain stores words in a form of meaning that transcends language, and just calls upon the language neural net to convert that into muscle movements for speech? Actually, no, then you'd have gotten the word-for-word translation; it must be storing more than single words in some sort of language lookup center, or maybe something that converts between the two structures if you do enough translating between a given language pair? Either way, mind-boggling stuff
I'm a non-native Dutch speaker and even I catch it, a sentence that looks like a 1-on-1 translation from English and than I have to think, no, this can't be proper Dutch.
Exectly the same thing happens to my native language. What causes it? I guess the overwhelming viewership of English spoken to control, so people actually start thinking in English, and translate their thoughts badly when they need to express themselves in their native languages.
Universal grammar theorists freak out whenever this is said, but I think that's because those translated sentences and possibly even logic beneath it just aren't valid in that language and culture, in your case Dutch. Else everything should perfectly translate between any arbitrary languages without adding unnatural or uncomfortable components.
To me a great translation should have Translator Notes (TN) and not be afraid of using neologisms. It seems TNs used to be more common but are increasingly rare.
All according to *keikaku*
(TN: keikaku means plan)
This meme comes from the overuse of TNs in anime fansubs to explain obvious things, things that did not need explaining, or where there would be a perfectly straightforward English word that would do the job.
Neologisms: do you mean neologism in the source language or the target language? This usually happens in the other direction, where the English words for things get copied straight over to other languages to refer to new items. There must be examples in the other direction but I can't immediately think of one.
I dislike translation notes. Translations are already a form of notes, so appending notes to notes is just bad form.
Some translations can be so awkward or simply impossible that leaving a translation note becomes inevitable, but a good translator should not have to need them everywhere.
I would be interested to know what you think about translating word plays.
One example. In LOTR there is a hobbit named Meriadoc, but his friends call him Merry, which is a shorthand for his name but also carries meaning. In one translation into my language, the translator opted to translate Merry into "Srečko", which is close in meaning. The connection to the original name is lost and the translator put that in the translation notes to explain that there is a connection. The rest of the book(s) then always use the semantic meaning. I found that solution to be great for the given problem.
Later translations didn't opt for that, instead keeping the shorthand, which would be just "Meri", which is a nice shorthand but completely drops the semantic meaning.
Word plays are by far among the most notoriously difficult pieces to translate, assuming it's even possible. Those kinds of situations are what I meant when I said some translation notes are simply inevitable.
Worse still is there might not be a "correct" way. Like in your example, one preserves the context while the other preserves the name. I'm sure we can agree both of them are critically important, but we (probably) can't have both of them.
A good translation is one where the "good" in the original comes through. That might be a concept, a story, or even the rhythm of the words. Great books especially have _many_ good things that a translation needs to handle. Translation is hard because sometimes translating a "feel" might come at a loss of the clarity needed to express an idea.
I like what Emerson said about it in "Books"
> What is really best in any book is translatable, – any real insight or broad human sentiment. Nay, I observe that, in our Bible, and other books of lofty moral tone, it seems easy and inevitable to render the rhythm and music of the original into phrases of equal melody.
To answer what is a great translation, we first need to ask to whom it should be great.
The readers? The only thing that makes a translation great for them is whether the translated text reads well. Whether the translation is accurate to the source material is irrelevant; the readers literally can't tell and don't care, that's why they are reading a translation!
The publishers or whoever hired the translator(s)? The most important thing for them is speed of translation, how many words per minute. Accuracy and reading well are secondary to speed. Time is money.
The translators themselves? Depending on whether these are amateurs translating out of passion or professionals translating for a living, what makes a translation great is going to be either accuracy or speed (time is money!) respectively.
Personally, speaking as a Japanese-American who has done amateur translations (anime fansubs) at one point, being a translator is terrible; the absolute worst thing about it is that the work is thankless. Whoever reads your translations simply can't appreciate quality, and if you're translating for someone for hire there are usually more pressing concerns over quality.[1]
>Whether the translation is accurate to the source material is irrelevant; the readers literally can't tell and don't care
As a professional translator, I cherish those readers. They have the good sense to trust me to do the technical part (understanding the original) and only criticize the artistic part (producing a beautiful derivative work).
The worst readers are the ones who have some knowledge of the source language, and rush to nitpick the technical decisions without considering the artistic ones. They are the literary equivalent of those "fans" who will watch a stunning film adaptation and then go home to complain about the colour of Gandalf's shoes or the width of a sand worm's molars. Ultimately, readers of this type are all ego, more concerned about being right than about whether the work is good.
The very best readers, of course, are knowledgeable in both languages and understand that "equivalence" goes far beyond what is written in the dictionary. But as you say, they don't need the translation!
> The readers? The only thing that makes a translation great for them is whether the translated text reads well. Whether the translation is accurate to the source material is irrelevant; the readers literally can't tell and don't care, that's why they are reading a translation!
On the contrary, readers generally read a translation because they want to read a specific work, and/or experience the culture it's part of, but can't or won't spend what it would take to become fluent in the language themselves. If they just wanted to read something that reads well they wouldn't be reading a translation. So accuracy is something they care deeply about, even - especially - if they're poorly qualified to assess it.
> being a translator is terrible; the absolute worst thing about it is that the work is thankless. Whoever reads your translations simply can't appreciate quality
Well, yes. It's like sound design, or colour grading, or stage magic; when you do it right, the audience doesn't notice that you've done anything at all. It certainly takes a certain mentality to thrive in.
> Personally, speaking as a Japanese-American who has done amateur translations (anime fansubs) at one point, being a translator is terrible; the absolute worst thing about it is that the work is thankless. Whoever reads your translations simply can't appreciate quality
I'm surprised that you feel that way, because I've always associated the anime community with caring very strongly (not always correctly, but always strongly) about the translations. Hence the fansubs in the first place. It's only really a thing for anime in the first place; there aren't many people fan-translating Spanish telenovellas or Kdramas into English, for example.
> Accuracy and reading well are secondary to speed. Time is money.
Looks like AI will accelerate this tendency. We'll get more, cheaper, but worse, translations. Which I see as a qualified good, since it means more amateur and "long tail" from other languages can make it to the English Internet.
>I've always associated the anime community with caring very strongly (not always correctly, but always strongly) about the translations.
As I came to find, most watchers simply couldn't care. How could they? They don't know Japanese! They certainly appreciated anime, but they couldn't appreciate translating and I won't blame them for not appreciating what they don't know.
Of those who did care, though, most of them judged translations for all the wrong reasons and usually without realizing. Kind of a similar vein to how most ham radio guys know enough electricity to be dangerous but not enough to be useful.
All in all I found the work was ultimately a thankless one and I burned out real bad after serving as a translator for a couple animes.
But the fansub group I was with were a great bunch, and the flame wars I had with other translators in other fansub groups were awesome. Flame wars between passionate people who know what they're talking about are a sight to behold.
from my experience doing animanga-adjacent translations - readers also prioritize speed first, quality second. there are a lot of people who will happily read machine-translated work (and often awkward, typo-ridden MTL at that) rather than wait a day or two for better translations. same goes for general scanlation quality, like typesetting and redraws.
this is also why the fansubbing scene is effectively dead - companies like crunchyroll get episode scripts early and can thus release subs simultaneously with the official release. most fansub groups now just fix/edit the crunchyroll script, if they even pick up series at all. there's no point in putting in the effort if no one's going to look at it, after all.
that's the main issue i have with 'more but worse' translations, honestly. you'll get more material, but the good translators won't just move to content that wasn't translated before - they'll just disappear entirely.
The translations in anime at least are unlikely to actually be worse, since a lot of the English anime translation industry are obsessed with inserting woke politics and cringey zoomer jokes into their translations and more or less hate the people who buy their products. There's a reason a lot of people are laughing at the activist translators losing their jobs to AI.
In areas where the translators are actual, responsible professionals, the quality will suffer.
Although your comment is unnecessary strongly worded, you raise some very serious points.
Especially Japanese - English entertainment media translations, it is very often pretty apparent that there is some kind of agenda behind translation of such works (even with translators admitting it them self doing so in comments / messages on different social media platforms).
Something I just wonder is, why does especially this niche part of this profession (translating Japanese entertainment media) attract people doing so and even let them admit to make it more culturally appropriate for western markets?
Japanese entertainment is among the more popular entertainment venues in recent years, and that means it's also a useful tool for political espionage. People interested in pushing political agendas would be fools to not exploit this as they would any other.
Hell, the distribution of Japanese entertainment across the world is in large part a Japanese government agenda[1] for diplomatic ends.
Hah! That "Cool Japan" thing! I remember some (lesser known) people to advertise for it. Dunno, it (cool japan) came to a halt in 2020 and never took off again afterwards.
I don't think Japanese translation is all that well paid, and if people don't get money from their work, they'll go for the job for other forms of payment (eg. status), or extract payment in other ways (half-assing things, being a petty tyrant like reddit mods, etc.)
As someone who can understand both languages, it's less that the translators are obsessed and more that the gamergate-adjacent crowd has decided to drag their culture war into anime translations. There are a handful of examples where the translation could be debated and a lot more where it's actually pretty accurate and tonally consistent with the Japanese (which is often not exactly high literature itself), but some guy armed with a Japanese 101 textbook and Deep-L wants to get an internet mob going about it because he's convinced that someone with a trans flag in their Twitter profile can't possibly be doing it right, or that Japanese creatives themselves couldn't have left-wing/pro-LGBT views.
See: people getting mad about the word "LGBT" appearing in the English version when the Japanese version also literally said "LGBT".
Yes. I rather liked "The War Nerd Iliad" by John Dolan ("War Nerd" is a moniker that Dolan used in a column he used to write). It's basically a version of the Iliad that eschews the poetry and tells the story in a straightforward fashion. It's actually quite moving in a way.
Is there even such a thing as "English hexameters"? From what I remember from high school hexameter is based on the feature of the Greek language having both "short" and "long" vowels, which is then used to create a particular rhythm. My mother's tongue does not have such feature which makes it impossible to make real hexameters in it. Translations do not even try to imitate it.
Hexameter just means that the lines have six feet. What counts as a foot in a language will differ, e.g. English feet are based on stress, whereas Ancient Greek feet are based on length. For example, in Ancient Greek, an iamb would be a short syllable followed by a long one (e.g. 'Δάφνη' - Daphne, which in A.G. was pronounced something like 'daph-neh', with the 'neh' held long), whereas in English it's an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one (e.g. 'become').
I enjoyed Hofstadter's _Le ton beau de Marot_, which is precisely about this question; it studies many people's different translations of one particular obscure poem, and asks what properties of the original should be preserved.
I came here to mention this book also. I learned a lot. He explores a mind numbing number of properties which are potentially in the mix. They depend in turn on the properties of the source material. (Authors play all kinds of games with meter and structure and arbitrary constraints - and preserving some can come at the cost of deprecating others.)
One warning: among the genuinely deep insights, Hofstadter can occasionally come off as smug and self-congratulatory about his own poetic genius. I found this rather off-putting - and surprising since I found the tone of G.E.B. rather more like enthusiastic play.
Written language is like the outer skin layer, a product of a living organism consisting of dead cells.
Being a good translator is to have a good sense of what those organisms are.
I'm always so torn about reading translations, especially of poetry. I do read them and value them but I always wonder what was lost in doing so.
I have a bit of a sense of this having learned a couple of languages enough to be aware of what's lost in translation, and examples of good and bad translations.
When did Woolsey alter the meaning and succeed? Sometimes he found a true translation that was underappreciated by an ignorant fanbase (the notorious spoony bard), sometimes he did the best he could while constrained by censorship that still compromised the results, and sometimes he straight-up screwed up.
Pound translated into English the Analects of Confucius, a bunch of Noh Plays, and many other works of Chinese and Japanese literature. But he was barely capable of reading Chinese or Japanese at all. He was provided with rough word-for-word translations by friends like Ernest Fenollosa, and he translated those into literature.
Logue didn't know any Ancient Greek, but his rendition of a part of the Iliad is probably the greatest achievement of late 20th century poetry. He simply re-worked the (many) existing English translations into something more lyrical and contemporary. In effect, he reinterpreted the existing body of translations -- and, in his own way, heightened their effect, and captured much of the spirit of the original.
I find that most translations -- especially of poetry -- tend to be altogether too mechanical. Pound and Logue had it figured out.