I’m realizing as we read and discuss throughout this semester that so much of the angst around faithfulness in translation has to do with credit: if I’m reading Smith’s translation of The Vegetarian, am I reading Smith, or Kang? Is it more fair to “give credit” to one or the other?
In my last discussion post, I said that the goal of disappearing as a translator is not a particularly productive role, but I didn’t expand upon that. What I meant (I think) is that translation is not, as I’ve come to learn in this course, a static practice. A writer is considering the time and space they’re writing within, and the translator is considering how the source text’s time and space compares and contacts with that of the audience they’re writing for; these are factors that are changing constantly.
This muddled loop of thoughts I’m trying to word succinctly circled back to while reading Cavanagh’s The Art of Losing. On page 5 she writes that “there is no equivalent to the villanelle in the Polish tradition,” therefore “the poetics of loss thus produce a clear gain for Polish poetry.” I hadn’t fully given thought to the function of Baranczak’s translation as an introduction of form into a new language. That alone feels like a large gain procured from the potential loss of a translation of One Art out of English.
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