Why should I care if translations are inherently inferior when numerous greats read poetry and philosophy in translation (Wagner read Aeschylus in German, Aquinas read Aristotle in a Latin translation)? What, for the metre? The sound of it? I can just hear someone recite it on youtube lol.
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kek only homosexuals on this worthless board harp on about 'le original'.
Yeah, it’s some bullshit on this forum. In fact some authors are better in translation.
Most of the time it really doesn't matter, especially if you're reading for the story; but there are cases, like Chinese lit, where not reading it in the original is a massive difference. You lose double meanings and what not in Chinese translations, since you just can't adequately translate that to any other language. A particularly famous example is a scene in A Dream of Red Mansions where the aroma of the tea being served is described as a warship on patrol around a harbor, which is lost in translation due to the warship analogy coming from the etymology of the characters used. You get the description of the tea aroma sailing around the room, but lose the striking image of a warship on patrol. I could effort post and provide both excerpts side by side to illustrate the example, but I need to get back to reading since my tea is getting cold as I type this out
That's interesting. Does this happen more frequently in English? Do you think certain Indo-European languages are better fitted to translate Chinese poems?
True. Good thing I don't care about asiatic literature
>my tea is getting cold as I type this out
Lmao. Patrician. Ricchie-boy.
Daddy's spoiled little brat. Moma's cute little fattie frick.
Ostentatious, presumptuous, lying little piece of shit.
Dirty rat!
Your hands are clean, but... the smell of the blood of the working class is all over you!
Got the money eh little guy?
Ricchie Rich. Son of a b***h.
Think you're better with your little tea huh?
Get the frick out of here motherfricker.
You're right that it's silly to avoid all translations (there's lots of good stuff we won't ever read if it's not in translation) but when you lump poetry & philosophy together and then dismiss "the sound of it" with contempt it suggests you're better off not reading poetry at all, since you don't seem to appreciate it.
Philosophy can be translated a lot better than poetry can, obviously.
I lumped poetry and philosophy together because those two fields are the ones that came to my mind when I was making the thread. I can appreciate a good poem, but I often find that if you only wish to get a "feeling" for the original, you should hear a recitation on youtube or something. I understand that if you want to acquire a deeper understanding of a poem's structure you would have to learn the language in which it was composed, but you would first have to become interested in a poem before you decide to learn an entire language. Obviously you can't read it in the original, so you have to resort to translations. I'll put it another way. Let's say you seriously want to learn Italian to read Dante. Something must have piqued your interest to learn an entire language just for one guy's poems. You probably would have to had read Dante's poems in another language before embarking on reading him in Italian. Otherwise, why would you learn a new language just for one guy whose work you know barely anything about? And as for why I mentioned philosophy, well, you often see people advising others to learn a language to better understand the philosophers who taught their philosophy in that language. Greek and German are usually the top recommendations. I'm saying if you want to compose something of your own and investigate metaphysics or whatever, you're fine with just reading philosophy in your native language.
"Translation is the reverse side of a brocade, all the threads are there, but not the subtlety of color or pattern"
It's just to feel smart. I only ever talk shit about translations when the original is written in a language I'm fluent in, but if it's not I'm getting a translation in one of my native langs.
Some older translations of ancient works have become classics in their own right too.
Because you are a frog poster and make all of your decisions based off of IQfy consensus?
>Because you are a frog poster and make all of your decisions based off of IQfy consensus?
Everyone who shits on "frog posters" is a far-left shill bully and a raider from another website because they view just "frogs" in general as a concept that creates unity in IQfy between the posters. Since they believe this, they see it as something bad so they are trying to forcibly de-popularize "frog posting" as some kind of demoralization tactic. Just be aware that these haters are not from here and they do not represent any of the actual real users on IQfy. Enjoy your stay on the last bastion of free speech on the entire internet, and please continue posting funny frog pictures as you have been for years. God smiles upon you posters of frogs, just as he sent the frogs in the biblical times with little happy smiles on their froggy faces, and God blesses you all. (but doesn't bless the raider bully shills) Have a great day, and rememeber: the rarest pepe is YOU.
Frick off moron
languages are different so obviously there are certain elements being unavoidably lost
learning languages only to read literature is fine
reading translated literature is fine too
no one can read every language but i would recommend to at least reach fluency in a second language
try to translate 吾輩は猫である。into english for example
japanese has multiple words for "i" and "i am a cat" is unable to convey the meaning of wagahai completely
being monolingual also results unavoidably in an anglocentric view on literature
find me a non-german who has read lessing, wieland, borchert, schlegel, jean paul, george, benn, fontane....
another example of untranslateable stuff would be the word ungeziefer in kafkas verwandlung for example since there is no english equivalent with the same connotation
You could still probably explain the significance of the term in a footnote and leave it untranslated so as to keep all the nuances that come with it (this is often done in Indian philosophy, for example, the word "Ātman" is often translated as either "body" or "self" but both ideas are often references when it's used in the Upanishads)
why not read the actual work? They can't put a footnote on everything, otherwise they'd have to print the translated work + the work to get all the footnotes
Because I want to read the work now instead of spending months or years grinding declensions and conjugations and practice reading just to read one text. Sometimes things are straightforward, so there's no need for a footnote.
Because reading a poem in translation is like watching a painting through a distorting lens.
Again, it's fine to read poetry in translation. The greats did it, so can you.
You're right that it's fine, but I still always feel like I'm missing out. From the little bit of the Divine Comedy I can read in italian, I can tell that it's a much better experience than reading it in English
agreed
"The greats did it" isn't a particularly compelling argument vis a vis the actual experience of reading a translation and comparing it to the original. "The greats did it" is also not a particularly compelling argument when you take the wiener of blind ancestor worship out of your mind for a second and realize that "the greats" is a vastly diverse group of people who did all sort of shit and believed all sort of theories.
Saying the greats read translations means that you can still understand and appreciate something through a translation, therefore proving that they aren't a waste of time. The people who say translations are worthless or something of the sort fail to mention that people read texts for different reasons. Some may only want to know what the text says literally while others want to hear the musicality of a poem and study its structure in detail. Learning a language would be tremendously useful for the latter group, but of little use to the first.
That's not a point,
You clearly don't know to what extent translations suck
I can read in multiple languages and I'm here to tell you that translations are fine if you simply want to know what the text says.
Do you read texts to """know what the text says"""? If you think a translation is fine then you don't know what the text says. Literature is not about ""knowing what the text says"" if you think that's the case you can just go to Wikipedia
Most of the time I read texts because I want to know what the other person has to say, like in this instance. Wikipedia will only give me something like a list of characters and a synopsis of the plot, but if I want to find out what the characters in the story say or what they did and how the author described a scene or whatever, I have to straight to the source. Sometimes reading summaries is also fine.
Yes, you gotta go straight to the source
>Wagner read Aeschylus in German
Wtf I thought Germans back then had excellent classical training in school
I recall reading he could read and recite some parts of it in Greek while he was young but he gave up in old age and read him in German instead
They did, but Aeschylus is a fricking nightmare. Plato, Aristotle, hell even Sophocles is easy compared to that ancient motherfricker.
Sappho is no slouch either. Deciphering her Aeolic made me want to kill myself more than once.
When he was writing the Ring he didn't know Greek, but later learnt it.
>Again and again, amid the most absorbing tasks of a life entirely removed from these studies, the only way by which I seemed to be able to gain a breath of freedom, was by plunging into this antique world, however much I was now handicapped by having well-nigh forgotten the language. On the other hand, while envying Mendelssohn his philological fluency, I could but wonder why this philological knowledge had not prevented him from writing his music to the dramas of Sophocles, since I, despite my ignorance, had more respect for the spirit of antiquity than he seemed to display. I have also known a number of other musicians, who could make no use of their knowledge of Greek in their composing and music-making in general, whereas I, strange to say, had worked out an ideal for my musical viewpoints, despite my restricted intercourse with the antique. Be that as it may, I only know there arose in me the vague feeling that the real spirit of the antique was as little apprehended by the average teacher of Greek, for example, as a genuine appreciation of French history and culture is to be presupposed on the part of our French masters.
>We are rarely able to translate any characteristic, pregnant, and significant passage from one language into another in such a way that it would produce the same effect precisely and completely. Even in mere prose the best of all translations will at most be related to the original as the transposition of a given piece of music into another key is to the piece itself. Those who understand music know the importance of this. Every translation, therefore, either remains dead and its style is forced, stiff, and unnatural; or it becomes loose, i.e., rests content with an à peu près [approximation], and is therefore false. A library of translations is like an art gallery full of copies. The translations of the authors of antiquity are a substitute for them, like chicory coffee for the real thing. Poems can never be translated, but only recast, which is always a dubious undertaking.
this dude seems to think languages are some inescapable tower-of-babel-tier barrier lol
this poster seems to think he wasn't filtered by something as simple as this lol
Anon... isn't that Schopenhauer quote translated from German?
sadly yes
stupid yankees wouldn't have understood the original
forgive me, schopie...
"traduttore, traditore"
besides, those examples are both languages much cooler (and more fit for poetry) than english
>Why should I care if translations are inherently inferior
Because they are inherently inferior. I give a damn if you care or not though, it's just another (pic related) in an enormous ocean of (pic related).
>I give
I don't give*
Inferior by what measure and for which purpose?
By the measure of my wiener inside your mother's ass
by learning the grammar of a language, you also learn the nature of the language itself.
For example, if you realize that most Greek words are compounds of other words, and that the Greeks had a "middle" as well as a passive, you can take a peek into the minds of great Greek philosophers
Just like how studying English grammar teaches you why the Analytic philosophers are so autistic, studying Greek lets you know how the ancient Greeks approached the world through langauge
it's a meme you dip
If you do not have 10+ years speaking and reading immersion in a language, you will by necessity have a poorer grasp of a work in the original language than any, and I mean literally any, translation. It's like thinking the crappy lasagna you made is better than what you get in a restaurant just because you were the one who threw together the store-bought ingredients from a list. Every IQfy anti-translationgay is a literal moron.
>10 years
More like 3 to 5 as long as you are not a midwit - this is my own exprience with three languages and I do not consider myself that above average at all.
You do not achieve the mastery required to appreciate literary language at a level higher than that which a translator circumvents in 3 to 5 years. You are a midwit and your understanding of the languages you "know" is far beneath what you believe it is.
Keep coping, man. In the meantime, I will keep reading literary works in their original language and discussing them here whenever I feel like it.
>If you do not have 10+ years speaking and reading immersion in a language, you will by necessity have a poorer grasp of a work
it's always funny when americans say shit like this because you know that they have never seriously tried to learn another language
rent free, Pedro
>rent free, Pedro
mietfrei, Ungeziefer
10+ years seems too much, I think 2 to 5 years is a decent estimate. You can focus only on reading if you're just interested in texts and nothing else. I think the bulk of the work would be consuming inpoot material and learning about the intricacies of a language.
>10+ years
HAHAHAHA
oh no no no esl bros what does all of this mean?!?
i am literally unable to comprehend any foreign word because i have only studied for 9,5 years...
im surprised there is even controversy over this. translations are blatantly inferior and much is lost. i still feel like i've never truly read the iliad, or the divine comedy, because i cant read them in their original language
I used to have those thoughts too, but then I realized they're moronic. I literally suffer from OCD, so those thoughts held me back from reading. In the end I realized it doesn't really matter and I learnt to enjoy reading.
this
is the same to read Dostoevsky in Russian as it is to read Dostoevsky translated into the language of an African American from Compton or a Redneck from deepest Texas literally?
I can agree to a certain extent that if one does not know a certain language one should at least rely on the translation (betrayal from latin) to me there are translators who can better explain certain events........
we ALL know how it feels when something important happens and two witnesses give their version of events, surprisingly there can be two totally different worlds but for OP it is all the same and its the same reason why he reads Dostoievsky for dummies instead and that's fine for him
another point against originals: sometimes it can be difficult to get ahold of a cheap copy of a work in the original language. the OWC edition of the Oresteia, for example, costs $7 while the Loeb edition costs something like $23
stupid argument, you're talking about a bilingual, academic hardcover release here
almost all books in other languages are cheaper than english paperbacks and don't forget the market for used books
i got goethe's complete works (18 volumes, hardcover) for around 30€, nietzsche's complete works as hardcover for the same price and schopie's works for around 40€
there are also many publishers which specialize on publishing classical literature for affordable prices
you can get a new hardcover release of kafka's collected works for 10€ or something
american mass market paperbacks on the other hand are the most disgusting book releases i have ever seen despite the works not being much more expensive in other languages
>almost all books in other languages are cheaper than english paperbacks
What? English paperbacks are literally the cheapest books out there. What other publisher can compete with Penguin? Reclam? I genuinely want to know because I wanna buy some cheap original language books too.
>used books
Used books are more expensive than English paperbacks in my country. They're also all literally 50+ years old and so their scholarship is often outdated and the physical state of the book tends to be poor.
>i got goethe's complete works (18 volumes, hardcover) for around 30€, nietzsche's complete works as hardcover for the same price and schopie's works for around 40€
Did you find this on Zvab, eBay, or irl? That's actually pretty cool.
>there are also many publishers which specialize on publishing classical literature for affordable prices
I know of a few publishers (Reclam, Aзбyкa Клaccикa, ACT издaтeльcтвo) that publish cheap translations of literary clsssics, but I think only Reclam publishes cheap bilingual editions of clsssics
>What other publisher can compete with Penguin?
reclam, hamburger lesehefte, anaconda, ... nikol
the latter three only if you don't care too much about proper editing
ordered shakespeares complete works in the schlegel/tieck translation for 30 bucks today (picrel)
>Did you find this on Zvab, eBay, or irl?
ebay kleinanzeigen, although zvab seems like a pretty good source for used books too
bilingual editions are usually harder to find but as you said you can almost always rely on reclam (or perhaps also tusculum/meiner if you have more money)
also sorry for the unfriendly tone in my previous post
perhaps i was seething a bit
>reclam, hamburger lesehefte, anaconda, ... nikol
I'm very satisfied with Reclam, but I haven't heard a lot of good things about Anaconda. It's very tempting to buy a "gesammelte werke" for such a low price.
>bilingual editions are usually harder to find but as you said you can almost always rely on reclam (or perhaps also tusculum/meiner if you have more money)
I would probably more bilingual editions if I had the money (Bompiani has a series called "Il Pensiero Occidentale" where you get the complete works of a philosopher in a single hardcover book, but each book typically costs like 60€)
>also sorry for the unfriendly tone in my previous post
lol its okay I should have tried to be more inviting
anaconda is usually fine for untranslated fiction - especially if you aren't planning on using the books for academic purposes
i usually prefer other publishers but i think i'll give in and get their hardcover releases of kafka's stories since the hardcover releases by fischer are so expensive
>Bompiani has a series called "Il Pensiero Occidentale" where you get the complete works of a philosopher in a single hardcover book, but each book typically costs like 60€
neat, so basically like those frenchie gallimard/pleiade releases?
i would like to give italian a try someday after learning the other romance languages
it sounds very nice, although i always mentally associate with marinetti's ZANG TUMB TUMB
>especially if you aren't planning on using the books for academic purposes
What counts as "academic purposes"?
>neat, so basically like those frenchie gallimard/pleiade releases
Yeah, I think so. The average page count of their books is upwards of one thousand. I think it's sometimes cheaper and easier to get one of those Italian books because the original language edition is often broken up into multiple volumes
>What counts as "academic purposes"?
listing them as sources and stuff like that
ah I see I thought you meant like introductions and notes
We've told you many times. Why do you insist on taking the truth about translations as you can't use translations, and why do you insist on returning again and again, trying to justify what you obviously don't believe given your insecurity.
what are you talking about
Some words in English only make sense to me after years of exposure.
>intellectual
Translates to a word that just means someone smart or educated, there are no connotations with being part of an elite class or contributing to academia or the more vague connotations. Without exposure to anglo culture in my mind it just means "smarter than average guy".
i will read joyce, poe and shakespeare in german.
>Why should I care if translations
You shouldn't.
In case of poems its not only about language but about context.. So what if Yeats is treat as one of greatest poets ever and I can read him in English no problem if I don't enjoy it because I don't understand what he talking about? I don't know about history of irish national struggle, I don't know about any historical characters he references. Polish poets I read are much greatest to me and of greater importance. I cry reading Slowacki I don't cry reading Yeats
are you the anon who made that thread about Mickiewicz the other day or so
Chuj z Litwa
When anons chastise others for not being able to read every text in its original language it seems petty to me, as if they're unaware what a privilege it is to learn a language in the first place
This translation autism was started by Protestant mutts obsessed with Bible translations because muh sola scriptura is all they were left with after hollowing Christianity of any tradition. Prove me wrong