Solitary Crow

The idea of Anthea Bell’s which Brian Nelson calls upon in his introduction— the metaphor of the translated text as an illusion— really interested me and got me thinking about the line we’ve been toeing with our weekly exercises between translation and adaptation. When a work has been exhaustively translated into English, it becomes very tempting to translate it in a way that amplifies one’s own voice (our Catullus exercise, for example, was freeing as an opening crack at translation because the piece was so translated that there was no longer any urgent need for a painstakingly accurate translation). The case which Lydia Davis presents in her essay is obviously that of Proust’s Du Côté de chez Swann, which has been translated into English but not relentlessly. I found it very surprising that Davis translates sight-unseen, not reading the books beforehand. I don’t write fiction, but I do read a lot of it, and this made me weigh the potential pros and cons of working that way (I appreciate subtle foreshadowing in a work of fiction, and this way of translating could eliminate this). Davis goes on to point out a moment in the Moncrieff translation when the narrator refers to a “solitary crow” when the original French refers to a crow, no “solitary,” because the narrator does not yet truly know that the crow is solitary. In this sense, an overall intimate familiarity with the work became somewhat of a translation hindrance. It probably really just depends on the translator and the translation. 

Samantha