ITT untranslatable authors

This is a meme. How do you learn another language in the first place if you first can't translate into your native tongue when starting out?

Why are you so sure you've learned any language to begin with?

You just understood what i said for a start

Not really. He was a master of the german language, especially of using it in an extremely distinct, peculiar but artful manner. No one has replicated, for example, the style of Der Landarzt in its original. None of the translation come close to the urgency and complexity of it

Is it worth learning German to read Kafka? I been considering it. Also for Goethe.

Obvious answer.

Imagine trying to translate Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. I know it's been done, but I remain skeptical as to quality.

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>its not bullshit you just don't know how suppah deep it is in moonrunes :^)

Not everyone is an anglocuck here

This. So much of what Joyce does involves playing with the English language specifically

Not that user.
If you are considering learning a new language for literature german is very good choice. It's tricky but I would say it is worth it.

When you've gotten past the point of "starting out" you may often think back on words and phrases that have quite a different meaning and nuance that you used to think simply translated over into x or y English phrase. Especially for languages that are unrelated to one's mother tongue. Ways of thinking and attitudes are subtly embedded into languages, I don't suppose I'd go so far as to call many things "untranslatable" (until we get into Finnegans Wake levels of language use) but translation can be a very difficult task and is often not pulled off well at all, even by professionals

>untranslatable

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IIRC Jorge Luis Borges approved of translations but he probably enjoyed the authorial questions involved.

I have wondered how much I enjoy Chekhov and Dostoevsky because of the translator, and because of the source itself.

Some authors also enjoy success abroad. Look at Philip K Dick and Edgar Poe in France. Good translators or what?

Pushkin

>Learning German for Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin and Novalis
woke
>Learning German for Kafka, Hesse and and Mann
good
>Learning German for Grass
Kill yourself my man.

how tf is Kafka untranslateable (or is this bait?)
anyways: Joyce, Shakespeare (or any poetry rly) Doblin, Mann, Schmidt, Sanscrit stuff etcpp come to mind

OP is pushing a meme. Kafka's sentences are pretty unique though: they're long and suspenseful, and those sentences rely on the structure of the German language. Translators try to replicate this in English, but it's not quite what Kafka wrote. Still, he's not "untranslatable."

Also, why is Mann untranslatable?

Is he? Even into Romance languages?

Has the opposite ever happened ? A translation so great it surpasses the original book ?

Yes. I had translation studies subject in college and there was some example but I don't remember now.
There was something like "Shakespeare sounds betterin German" or something of that sort.

>Learning German for Bernhard, Sebald, Bachmann, Wittgenstein, Broch, or Schopenhauer
woke af

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I'm actually currently learning German and using Kafka to study. I have a book of his stories with the original on one side and English on the other. Can anyone post a specific quote/snippet/etc. showing why his prose is so much better in German? I guess I don't really have a feel for it yet because I'm still just in a learner's mindset.

>tfw learning german for kafka, rilke and heidegger

I've read Ulysses translated (portuguese) and in the original and the translation was thoroughly enjoyable, Antonio Houaiss made an excellent job, he was able to maintain some of the wordplays and maintained all the lewdness, obscenities, bad words, etc. Comparing it with other portuguese translation, this one is the only good one, the others are all sterilized and "well mannered", so you turn an extremely playful and well humoured book into a serious, tasteless masturbation, turning it unreadable.

Can it be translated? fuck yes, but its not easy.

anglos don't like ... .. ... . . . . . . . . . . . .

Germans think their Shakespeare is better because it was translated in the 1800s and is therefore more easily comprehended than the English Shakespeare

I've heard a few philosophy professors say that Kant is easier to read in translation since his German syntax is rather tortured and translators have enough latitude to clear it up. One of them mentioned studying Kant in Germany and having classmates read him in English translation because it was clearer.

Marquez loved the English translation of 100 Years.

And then there are the translations that are valued in their own right like the Moncrieff translation of Temps Perdu, though I don't think anyone would say that it's better than the original.

Could someone elaborate specifically on Kafka's case? He is one of my favorite author, I've read him both in french and english. I am highly interested in translations and the problems arising in such a task. Learning another language while fully immersed in the culture opened my mind on a level no other experience was able to reach. Like an author said, I don't remember which one, you cannot master your own language if you are monolingual. There are no reference point from which to compare.
If any of you guys had ressources talking about translating from Russian, I would gladly read them, or hear you talk about it as well. (from russian to french would be best)

this is probably not what you are referencing, but kind of is the same idea
>"I speak: Portuguese, German, French, English, Spanish, Italian, Esperanto, some Russian; I read: Swedish, Dutch, Latin and Greek (but with the dictionary right next to me); I understand some German dialects; I studied the grammar of: Hungarian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Lithuanian, Polish, Tupi, Hebrew, Japanese, Czech, Finnish, Danish; I dabbled in others. But all at a very basic level. And I think that studying the spirit and the mechanism of other languages helps greatly to more deeply understand the national language. In general, however, I studied for pleasure, desire, distraction".

Supposedly Marquez loved the English translation of 100YOS

Spotted the monolingual

>anything sounding better in German
thanks for the laugh

Kafka is easily translatable, I can assure you as a native English speaker who's read all of his novels and most of his short stories.

I'm inclined to say that Arno Schmidt, especially his later work (after KAFF), is not sufficiently translatable as it relies very heavily on the phonetics of German dialects and on other idioms of the German language. But I haven't read the recent translations by John E. Woods so I might be wrong.

Finnegan's Wake also seems to be largely untranslatable seeing as there still is no complete German translation of it, probably for the same reasons as Schmidt.

The German translation of Ulysess by Hans Wollenschläger is considered to be among the greatest literary achievements in German since 1945

*native German speaker I meant

how is this even possible? there's a chapter in which Joyce gives basically a condensed history of English prose styles, moving from Anglo-Saxon to the 20th Century. how is this in any way translatable to Portuguese or German?

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the polish translation of Ulysses took longer to complete than the original novel.

>Mann

well guess what, each of those styles was somehow translated into plenty of languages before, and no matter the language, they diffee when you juxtapose them

how the fuck can you render a convincing Middle English extract in Portuguese? my point is not that it literally cannot be done, but that you lose so much in the process and have to make so many compromises that we can safely call Joyce's work 'untranslatable.'

Not the same guy, but in Spanish there are translations that do the reconstruction of language in Spanish. Of course it's a big creative liberty to do so, but the translation become a great work of his own.

Norway here. I’m an Evan Dara scholar at the University of Bergen. The complexity of his diction, the inventiveness of his grammar and syntax, make him nearly impossible to translate. Each paragraph is treated with the utmost precision such that I feel the deep underlying symbols and meaning in Mr. Dara’s work are completely lost in Norwegian.

Fuck off Evan

In those cases the translation becomes a work of its own

Yes

good point

I’m not Evan, I am a scholar at the University of Bergen.

Sure thing, Evan.

They made two Hungarian translations of Ulysses, two of Portrait, and one partial of the Wake.

I love how this thread baits all the monolingual murishart creaturas out of the bushes.
>Wahh everything is just as good once translated into my hackjob if a language.
Kys

patrish

what language are you typing right now, and why?

This is completely disrespectful

False. The Mannheim translations are excellent. The same translator for Mein Kampf, too.

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>why are Americans speaking from an American, English-speaking perspective?!
you have that special type of continental euro-tardation. fuck off.

DFW

kek dont forget
>every language is perfectly translated into english
>but english is impossible to translate
>so i only need english

Not sure why this made me kek so hard but cheers user

Fuck this is exactly my literary motivation to learn the language.

I remember when I studied ancient philosophy most of the classes were just the teacher who had actually translated a lot of Plato's work explaining what certain word mean. Words like tekne, anima and more.

If you were bilingual, you’d know the answer. The point of mastery for any foreign language is when you don’t need to resort to your first language anymore.

Yes. Musil, Mann, Zweig and Bernhard make it the best (second) language to learn.

what's some good german lit to buy my friend who's learning german? he's reading zweig atm

>best second language
At best, it’s third after French and Spanish.

How does he manage? Zweig is usually read in upper level Austrian high-schools. Arthur Schnitzler shouldn't be too hard. Maybe Canetti.
Bernhard is a difficult one.

Missed the point. Through translation you lose the original's authenticity - poetry is an excellent example. Translations quite literally transform the text into something, albeit similar, nevertheless different. I assume, the user meant that, and not that it's impossible to learn a new language. Discrediting this truth does let people delusionally believe there are no differences between languages, which can't be real.
Either you believe languages have unique qualities and lose meaning through translation, or believe they have none and are all equal.

Sah ein Knab’ ein Röslein stehn,
Röslein auf der Heiden,
War so jung und morgenschön,
Lief er schnell es nah zu sehn,
Sah’s mit vielen Freuden.
Röslein, Röslein, Röslein roth,
Röslein auf der Heiden.

Knabe sprach: ich breche dich,
Röslein auf der Heiden!
Röslein sprach: ich steche dich,
Daß du ewig denkst an mich,
Und ich will’s nicht leiden.
Röslein, Röslein, Röslein roth,
Röslein auf der Heiden.

Und der wilde Knabe brach
’s Röslein auf der Heiden;
Röslein wehrte sich und stach,
Half ihm doch kein Weh und Ach,
Mußt’ es eben leiden.
Röslein, Röslein, Röslein roth,
Röslein auf der Heiden.

This poem is by Goethe, the grammar of German allows a certain irony to exist with the use of pronouns. The last pronoun is ambiguous as to whom or what it refers to allowing multiple interpretations. These translations on wikipedia in English are very onesided in their interpretation because of linguistic restriction.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidenröslein

Rilke for me

>Shakespeare
Kek, the Germans have been autistically translating him for over hundreds of years

if you're into Rilke try also George and Trakl, excellent stuff
Ich weiß, but the translations suck
some works, mainly Buddenbrooks and esp. Faustus, I guess MM etc. are fine in trans