Unrelated to above, but I wonder how much beauty is lost in poetry with translation. Specifically, I wonder how much is actually changed between the original and the English translation... but I wouldn't even know how to quantify that. Blissful ignorance, perhaps.
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> Unrelated to above, but I wonder how much beauty is lost in poetry with translation. Specifically, I wonder how much is actually changed between the original and the English translation... but I wouldn't even know how to quantify that. Blissful ignorance, perhaps.
I also often wonder this about translations. I feel most comfortable with translations produced while the author is still living. And ideally the author has at least some facility with the language to which their work is being translated, which allows them to collaborate with the translator. Two authors who fall into this category are Haruki Murakami and Eugene Vodolazkin — I'm sure there are others as well. (Perhaps this dynamic is less available for languages that aren't as ubiquitous than English.)
If I recall correctly — which I may not — Nabokov translated some of his own Russian works into English, and/or worked with his son? Hopefully someone else can correct my faulty memory here :)
* It is not possible to specify in advance how a good translation looks like, it is one of those "I know it is good when I see it". Naturally this assumes that the author can read the destination language reasonably well, otherwise they don't have a clue.
* When authors can read the translation, they tend to feel very strongly about it. An author payed a large sum of money for a translation, hated it, binned it and payed another translator to start from scratch.
* Many good translators (by whatever good may mean here) are not authors themselves.
WRT Nabokov, some of his works were originally written in English - Lolita for example. He then went ahead and translated Lolita to Russian.
Enter the translator, he picks the original sequence of characters in the source language, translates them into a sequence of character in destination language so that the reader of that destination language can decode the characters into their personal mental structures. Amazing.