Monday, October 15, 2007
Well, it's a theory...
'As a general rule, I believe that translation should be a work of collaboration. The person responsible for the final version into English, let us say, must not only possess English as his mother-tongue; he must also be a master of it, alive to its subtlest nuances. But very few writers who are masters of their own tongue have equal mastery over another. As his collaborator, therefore, he needs a person who knows some English but whose mother tongue is the original, or, in the case of dead languages like Greek and Latin, a first-rate philological scholar.'
Labels:
prose,
sentences,
translation
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3 comments:
yes, but whose is it? i feel sure i have read it before. maybe in the TLS review of some Ted Hughes translations. if i'm right about that, what do i win?
No orchids for Mr Baines today, sadly: it's a piece of the pure, the blushful WHA ('On Translation', an introduction he wrote to an American high school reader of world literature). It's interesting for my work, but I am undecided whether or not it's daft in more general terms.
and there's me thinking you were simply revelling in your felicitous domestic circumstances.
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