Bolaño on translations

>Interviewer: Is it disturbing to think we have read many of our gods (James, Stendhal, Proust) in translation, in second-hand versions? Is that literature? If we spin the matter around, it’s possible we might end up concluding that words don’t have an equivalent.
>Bolaño: I think they do. Furthermore, literature is not made from words alone. Borges says that there are untranslatable writers. I think he uses Quevedo as an example. We could add García Lorca and others. Notwithstanding that, a work like Don Quijote can resist even the worst translator. As a matter of fact, it can resist mutilation, the loss of numerous pages and even a shit storm. Thus, with everything against it—bad translation, incomplete and ruined—any version of Quijote would still have very much to say to a Chinese or an African reader. And that is literature. We may lose a lot along the way. Without a doubt. But perhaps that was its destiny. Come what may.

Thoughts?

>Furthermore, literature is not made from words alone

What the fuck?

>THE WHITE REVIEW — What do you think are the advantages, disadvantages or dangers of translation?

>LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI — I won’t say anything about advantages and disadvantages but I will address the question of dangers because they simply don’t exist. The translated work, in my opinion, is in no way to be identified with the original in a different language. That is an absurdity. The translated work is the work of the translator, not the author. The author’s work is that which comprises the story as written in the original language. The translated work is a new work in the language deployed by the translator, a work of which the translator is the composer, and resembles – more or less, as members of a family resemble each other – the original work. The author simply looks on and reads: the text is familiar, occasionally very familiar, to him and he is delighted when it looks good, and rages when it looks bad. I have only ever once raged, at the German translation of War and War which turned out a bad book. It was almost impossible to repair. Who would take on a new translation? That was very difficult. But apart from that every translation of my work has filled me with wonder. I have marvellous translators.

>what is meter, melody, cadence, consonance, artwork instilling feeling, paper quality, using syntax to illicit certain feelings

read better, m8

Narrative-driven novels probably don’t suffer translations as much, that’s for sure.

...

>illicit
>elicit

>giving this much credit to translators
Wew

>upvote is orange
>downvote is blue
triggered

He's right, though. You have to be a good writer to be a good translator.