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

[damiel.livejournal.com]

I am very sympathetic towards her intention to update Cervante's language while retaining the archaic style of Quijote's delivery. Still, there is a lyricism present in the original which is not quite in her rendition (although to what extent this lyricism is a matter of seeing 16th-century Spanish through a modern lens is a debatable matter).

That said, however, she needs to take a few more passes through this, and note and correct some glaring errors. An example:

And the first thing he did was to attempt to clean some armor that had belonged to his great-grandfathers and, stained with urine and covered with mildew, had spent many long years stored and forgotten in a corner.

I found the thought of the armor being stained with urine somewhat odd, so I went to the original and found tomadas de orín. While it's true that orín means both rust and urine in Spanish, I think the context narrows the choices a bit more, and, at any rate, the phrasal form tomarse de orín means precisely to get rusty, ruling out her somewhat curious translation.