новый Дон-Кихот; культура перевода

[avva]

Эти "неграмотные, бескультурные, примитивные" американцы не дремлют, а переводят Сервантеса.

Новый перевод "Дон-Кихота" будет опубликован в следующем году; ссылка выше ведёт на первые несколько глав из этого перевода. Выглядит очень даже неплохо на первый взгляд. Внизу страницы есть ещё несколько замечаний переводчицы; в частности, она пишет, на мой взгляд, очень правильно:

I believe that my primary obligation as a literary translator is to recreate for the reader in English the experience of the reader in Spanish. When Cervantes wrote DON QUIXOTE, it was not yet a seminally masterpiece of European literature; or the book that crystallized forever the making of literature out of life and literature; or explored in typically ironic fashion, and for the first time, the blurred and shifting frontiers between fact and fiction, imagination and history, perception and physical reality; or set the stage for all Hispanic studies and all serious discussions of the history and nature of the novel in Europe. When Cervantes wrote DON QUIXOTE his language was not archaic or quaint. He wrote in a crackling, up-to-date Spanish that was an intrinsic part of his time (this is instantly apparent when he has Don Quixote, in transports of knightly madness, speak in the old-fashioned idiom of the novels of chivalry), a modern language that both reflected and helped to shape the way people experienced the world. This meant that I did not need to find a special, somehow-seventeenth-century voice, but could translate his astonishingly fine writing into contemporary English.

А какова вероятность того, что сейчас по-русски, скажем, появится и выйдет в свет новый перевод "Дон-Кихота"? Да нет никакой вероятности, один пшик такой. А зачем нам новый перевод? У нас есть замечательный перевод Любимова, мы его ещё сто лет издавать будем.

А почему? Потому что культура канонического перевода. Ненавижу это всей душой.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I read the start of her translation and liked it very much, then read the paragraph you quoted explaining her theory and liked it equally. That's the attitude you need in order to translate effectively. And there are shockingly few adequate translations if you really compare the original (I'll never forget the shock of doing that with Rabassa's celebrated translation of Cortazar's Rayuela/Hopscotch -- I thought about trying to retranslate it, but who would publish it?).

Steve

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I'm forever obsessed with comparing translations and originals, for languages where I can read the originals.

Spanish, alas, isn't one of them. Can you say a few words about how Rabassa's translation is unfaithful to Rayuela? I never read Rabassa's Hopsotch, I read the thing in a Russian translation (Игра в классики), but I did hear a lot about how great Rabassa's translation is.

[(Anonymous)]

Dammit, for years I would whip out a beat-up old copy of the translation, full of marginal exclamation marks and corrections, to show people how awful it was, and now that I need it I can't find it. What I fear is that during the last move, when I was trying to lighten the load by throwing things overboard, I may have looked at it, said "that goddam lousy Rabassa translation, who needs it?" and put it into the trashpile. If so, I'm in the unfortunate position of having slandered a famous and respected man without being able to back it up. I'll keep looking, but if I can't find it I'll just have to take the translation out of the library and try to find some choice examples for you.